Early Summer in Pennsylvania blossoms into Wild Black Raspberries, Mugwort sprouting up wherever you let it, Wild Yarrow that hides in the tree line and roadsides, pretending to be Queen Anne's Lace. I see the snake tails disappearing into the long grasses and listen for the calls of the nighthawks. It only takes opening the eyes of your eyes and the ears of your ears to see the medicine all around you.
I turned my chicken coop into a potting shed and have fully dived into herbalism classes and study. I had always dabbled, but I wanted more formal training, and so I am getting it. I have always grown herbs to use for teas and salves, but it is different this year when my eyes became more finely tuned to the subtle healing of all the native plants of my area. My kids thought I was magick when I chewed up a Fleasbane Daisy and put it on a bugbite of my son, and it disappeared. I felt like magick too, as he said, "I thought that was a weed."
Weeds are just a matter of perspective, son.
I think about that quite a bit--how the thing we think is a nuisance ends up becoming the medicine. How a flower's beauty is all a matter of perspective. Same with humans. I think about how hard I work pulling unsanctioned flowers out of a bed I am trying to plant flowers in. We learn the things we learn through nature. I have never wasted an experience...I have used it all in some way. I would venture to say you have too.
I have spent the last few years healing trauma from different realms of my life--big traumas and little ones. I honestly just started calling things by their proper name. It has been the most humbling, difficult aspect of my work with self-love and self-compassion. I suppose this is called shadow work, but it feels more like integration work.
I remember being particularly keyed up and triggered by something and losing my patience with my kids a few minutes later. I put myself in time-out and my husband followed me. I was crying. And in that crying without thinking I said, "Why did bad stuff happen to me?" It is a question I never let myself ask, really. It feels so immature, so unevolved, to ask that question, and yet, the child in me needs a voice too. I have suppressed her for too long. Sometimes the work we need to do is just to say--that just wasn't fair.
For me, sitting in the unfair, is not comfortable. I am a fighter (not a flighter or fawner). I prefer fighting for justice. I don't usually struggle with fighting for my rights or the rights of others. But just sitting with injustice is so difficult for me. And yet that has been the work of the last few years...sitting in injustice--in our outer world with the struggles of black and indigenous people (761 bodies of indigenous children found this week outside of a residential school is such a horrendous example of this), and people of color, and then in our inner world with our own suffering and struggles healing trauma, addiction, codependency, fear, grief, anger, physical and mental struggles...we have to sit with injustice. All of us.
After I sit and feel the weight of it, I take a breath. I process it. And then look at this unsanctioned act and make medicine out of it. When Elizabeth Kubler Ross and David Kessler mention the 5 stages of grief, they were talking about acceptance of death. It was written for those who were dying, not those who were living, but quickly, it was adopted by the grieving. Recently, I read that Kessler postulates another stage for the grieving--making meaning. This is what humans do. We make meaning. We seek a story. We want to thrive.
And so I challenge you to make meaning out of a loss, to find a weed and make it medicine. There is beauty in every flower. It is just a matter of perspective.
