In Part 1 I did some musing and rambling on the importance of this point along the year’s wheel, with the understanding that every season presents us with challenges and potential medicine. And here, I want to write a bit about a potent herb for this season, Devil’s Club, to which I owe endless gratitude.
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One of my current fascinations is the healing that comes from syncing-up and sinking-into biological cycles and the external concert. So I’ve given myself the challenge to ask, at every point in the year’s circle, what is the challenge of this time? what is it’s potency? It’s medicine? What keeps the cycle spinning? This project dances up against another project of mine, which is also about syncing and sinking and has at it’s core a desire to know more about the people and places I come from.
Read MoreImagine a long-maned stallion breezing across a golden plain, a V of Canada Geese— wild and free, unruly and uncouth. Now lets take that same picture of freedom and flip it’s on it’s head. Nature is freedom, but it’s also highly ritualized, following tight rhythms, intricate patterns, cycles, and rules— like the sophisticated geometry of a snowflake. Animal, bacteria, fungi, protozoa; everything, including us human-beings, is made up of an expansive cosmology of overlapping and dancing rhythms and cycles, governed by intricate rules as strong and delicate as spider webs.
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The following is a slow exploration and loving praise of one of my most used and most beloved allies of the plant and mushroom kingdom; a little something to put in your pot and simmer on…
But before I get ahead of myself, lets start with basic introductions. The Japanese name of Reishi is the common name used to refer to a whole constellation of conks which are called Ganodermas. The Japanese Reishi, whose latin name is Ganoderma Lucidum, is the most sought after and revered of this constellation; however the North American varieties of Ganoderma Applanatum (often known as Artist’s Conk) and Ganoderma Tsugae share most of the same uses...
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It’s the first day of spring; the sun is climbing higher in the sky with each passing day and with that I’m wanting to give a shout-out to some plant allies that served me well in the clinic this past winter season.
And don’t get me wrong, I love the amniotic sleep of winter, and had the good grace of being able to spend a large portion of it out of the hustle of the city, where things can more fully sink into the ‘winteryness’ of winter– curling into themselves like seeds: waiting, cultivating, dreaming, and re-nourishing. But even in the most ideal of situations these winter months can be hard without summer’s flame circulating our energy and dazzling and distracting our senses with the flamboyancy of it’s armfulls of flowers and swollen fruits– everything flirting and buzzing in fat flowering elation. Winter is when the frills fall away and we’re left in the bone marrow of it all....
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There are countless plant medicines to choose from for anxiety, so like a village matchmaker, all art lies in tracing the details. What does your anxiety crave? From what does it rise up from: a place brittle and burned out, or tightly wound like a ball? A hole with no bottom? Does it send your energy fleeing like so many sparrows, or sink you like a stone?
And so we meet Albizia Julibrissin, also known as Mimosa, Silk Tree and whose Chinese name, He Huan Hua, translates to mean “collective happiness bark”. Much more than just a herb for anxiety, Albizzia’s playful spirit laughs away the stubborn grips of the fear and anger.
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At the request of a good friend, this post is dedicated to those who are fighting for the land, it’s people, and the spiritual integrity and beauty of these things– whether warriors, renegades of the heart, mothers, lovers, front-liners or anyone whose grief-drenched heart is breaking over the culture wilting, land ravaging oppressions here and far away. These are troubled times friends, and some carry a bit more of the burden or find themselves a little deeper in this too-big-to-humanly-comprehend-immensity of it all, whether that be from the daily oppressions of colonialism, racism, patriarchy or the pain of feeling the people and land you love hurting.
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Shatavari’s blessing is not one of spiritual transcendence, or a blessing from high above, but a kind of embodiedness that brings us into the fat exuberance of being here; teaching us that heaven is neither below us or above us but found in the practical joys of everyday life; enjoying earths bounty in food and cloth, laughter and friends around a table, a freshly swept floor, full pots of soups, and a roaring fire...
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Regardless of how you might feel about Valentines day– herbs, love and sex go well together, and so it only seems right to zero in on this synergistic triad this mid-February, and particularly the renowned herbal aphrodisiacs.
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This morning the green fists of the peonies are getting ready
to break my heart
as the sun rises,
as the sun strokes them with his old, buttery fingers
It’s mid January and harvesting has for the most part come to a standstill as the energy of plants descends into a deep winters sleep; traveling downwards from leaf and fruit and into the dreaming earth to be held in coiled roots, waiting to unfurl into spring...
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