Diving into the bones of Elemental organisation

Aug 08, 2024

Greetings lovelies, it’s me diving into the beginnings of a book.

Over the last five years or so I have been working on a series of plant essays. Writings that arose like mountains within me, themes which would start meandering around like rose and betrayal, centered on the medicine the plant has to offer and then I would proceed to carry around bits and pieces, ruminants of these ideas and finally sit down (and this was excruciatingly uncomfortable, but rather like birth, unavoidable) and spit the words out onto paper.

I would post them to facebook (which is about the least satisfying thing to do when craving recognition) but mostly feedback was good and various people told me they had been moved or carried or edified in some way or another. Good enough that it became clear that when talking about the medicine and actions of a plant in depth, this was how I wanted to teach. So I’ve carried this collection of stories around, rather like a bushel of children, every now and then parading them out at a conference, as a class where we all sit, try the medicine of the plant, talk about harvesting and listen to the story.

Rather than launch me into the world of publishing this became a pivotal point in my teaching career. I loved teaching with my stories, teaching from my heart. For years I have been struggling with the public needing to know about the “science” of the plant - because I had no science. Or if I did it was what I googled instead of you googling. Maybe I had slightly more in depth knowledge about physiology and energetics and what sources to resource but it wasn’t my questions about in vitro actions that informed me about the herb, it wasn’t my knowing and it wasn’t my experience. And so when I embraced storytelling I finally got to become a teacher through experience. I get to be in myself.

It’s been good and I could almost let it rest at that but for the fact that my stories have been calling for a book of sorts. And wonderful people like my astrologer who has a great substack has been letting me know that nows the time.

Here’s where it gets a bit off putting. The essays are personal. After all experiences hopefully for the most part are. The fact that the space between the plant essays, the dividing bits, the hallways, the interim seemed to beg to be filled up with my life’s path was also intimidating. The facts of who I am and what I’ve done and ha! the other people involved! So grudgingly, because well its messy and leaves so much room for judgement and worst, revealing how I see myself (and would anyone be interested?) I realised that I should get over it and write about my life around each essay.

At first I thought I might loosely divide it up by the months. After all this book is centered around my relationship with medicine making and thats very grounded by the calendar. I’m not going to just decide to make elder medicine in February and buy dried berries ( although I could and if you need to please do) but I’m first and foremost a medicine maker1. After all how can I be in relationship with a plant if I dont have my hands all over them? Thats just me. Ruled by Venus. So as a medicine maker I make elderberry medicine when I can harvest the elderberries.

So the idea felt wrong, maybe because the 12 month calendar doesn’t fit that well within the world or maybe it was because I had to settle on 12 plants, but probably because as soon as I thought of it I got bored.2

A friend suggested to just do 9 plants, but I need a thread. I needed to hold it all together, rather like the most brilliant book from Mathew Wood, 7 plants as teachers which uses Genesis as a thread.

It then came to me that I should just go around the wheel. I have spent alot of time learning about the elemental aspects of life - fire, water, earth, wood and metal (and you can see from the exclusion of air and inclusion of wood and metal that i’m coming from the Chinese traditions). I’ve always used archetypes to help with my navigation of the unknown. My mind works well with that type of information. I do after all read the Tarot as one of my 100 part time gigs.

I think I might play around with moving through the elements and their corresponding seasons and see how it plays out. See how I can weave my life in and out, starting with water. I’m intrigued and interested to be able to break up the timeline of my life and play a bit with using the corresponding emotions of the seasons to match my stories rather than just a linear timeline. And it makes sense to talk about the incidents of my life that correspond with the medicine that aids with that specific healing.

For those of you who want to get a bit more of a grasp on elemental archetypes and how I use them I include this essay on horsetail and the element of water. It’s a good primer. It’s good enough I believe to be in the book with some tweaking so your comments would be helpful.

Life Straw of Magical Elixir

horsetail and the water element

A lot of the medicinal weeds sit on the in between. In between forest and field, concrete and wildness, sand and earth, rock and dessert. They grow between the crevices always reaching and searching and looking for that expression of life in its fullest through the cycle, youth, flowering, seeding and death.

Understanding and observing these patterns can be done through many frameworks and alot of different archetypes of thinking have influenced herbology over the millennia. All with their own specific roots and flavors from astrology, energetics and humors to name a few. And they are all describing the same process, the same vital flow, just with a lens attuned to the culture from which it was made. As someone from a fragmented culture, a culture remembered by the written word and lacking in oral tradition I started my studies in herbalism at a disadvantage. After much time and dipping my toe into many pools, I find myself most affiliated with the Chinese philosophy of Five Element Theory and this is the framework which I most resonate with when it comes to describing the interplay of all those in between processes and it’s this lens I most look through when trying to understand the relationships in what I observe .

Right now the weed that I am looking at and getting ready to harvest is horsetail, equisetum arvense, a plant that in the five elements we associate with the element of water, water who belongs to the season of winter, as wood belongs with spring, fire with summer, earth with late summer and metal with fall, compromising the five elements that give this frame work its name.

Herbal medicine is based on observation, like any science, and our conclusions arise out of those observations. Even steadfast laws are up for question as the more we observe, our conclusions change. I have also found that understanding what all of our senses inform us to be extremely important in aiding my observations. So to be a good herbalist you often just need to make time to sit, look, listen, taste, feel and ponder. It is an all consuming business and indeed takes a life time. My teacher of the five elemental Chinese tradition is a great ponderer and it seeps in, the more you look and listen, the more you metabolize, the more the questions percolate and you find yourself a wonder.

So over the years as I have harvested horse tail I have taken the time to sit and listen, taste, smell and feel and ponder upon this great herb and its medicine. And over the years I feel I understand more why it is so good for balancing and helping the water element within us and how the two are inter connected and would like to share some of my thoughts about this popular plant.

The first sensation coming from this modest and ubiquitous plant is just how Old it is. You feel it just in the shape of the thing, that this is a being that has sat with us for a long time and witnessed us for ever. Another thing to notice is that it does love water and the horsetail I have harvested in times past has been down at the beach, on the edge of the forest and rocks, nestled in amongst the drift wood and sand and surrounded by the deeply forest loam filtered running streams that it abounds in. For that is another thing about horsetail, it is a plentiful plant given the right conditions and you will hear many a curse about just how impossible it is to negotiate sharing space with it in your garden and indeed how tiring it is to try and weed them out of an area.

(In fact most of the pictures I sourced for this article came from websites with titles like how to destroy horsetail, a common attitude in the west with potent and powerful herbs)

Yet horsetail is not so much vigorous and opportunistic as say blackberry but persistent and steadfast. Horsetail has an enduring quality, a descriptive that holds as much weight to me.

In the west, my culture, we are still entrenched in the habit that knowledge is a collection of written material. When I look up its medicinal use, I can read that this living fossil has Xyloglucan endotransglucosylase (MXE) activity and that due to the correlation between MXE activity and cell age, MXE has been proposed to promote the cessation of cell expansion, which could have an unknown influence on possible cancer.

That is how we are taught to learn after all. But as information becomes more and more dispersed and sources become less and less reliable, I am going to constantly encourage the practice of getting different reference points that are just as valid, such as observing, tasting, listening and feeling and experiencing.

Indeed I have such a hard time comprehending what MXE activity is all about yet I do know what enduring feels like. And if I take the time to unravel the reductionist descriptions of this novel enzyme that belongs alone (as far as we know) to horsetail I can say yep, this is another interesting observation that might help me understand how I feel that horsetail is an ancient wise one who has an ability to influence cell strength. How horsetail can aid us and pass on a little of its wisdom around how we too can be steadfast, persistent and enduring. That is backed up by my observations in others and myself in the way I feel the effects of horsetail when I take it as medicine. So yes I am pushing back against this reliance on obscure sources of knowledge, but rather than try to diminish all the different ways of learning I am more encouraging that you look to your own wisdom as well. Therefore, much to the disappointment of some of my students who are looking for sources of trust outside themselves, ie the facts, and to the increasing delight of others who are needing to know how to trust themselves, I generally stick to my personal observations and experiences with the herbs I am teaching about, with additional anecdotes from my teachers or colleagues.

Another thing that I notice when I look at horse tail is that it pulsates. It has a rhythmic undulation to its shape, the little almost identical segments that fit so nicely into each other, that way that it doesn’t really have leaves but is almost more like a frilly straw with that hollow center - and when it’s in its favourite placement of water ways, that straw being all succulent and juicy within the scratchy silica coated matrix of its shape. Almost like a Life Straw of magical elixir.

Horsetail is many, structured, unfolding, cascading, skeletal, sectional, verdant and cool.

All of this tells me that horsetail knows how to pulse, undulate and ripple. That it has a wisdom around the release, pause, retain rhythm that is so integral to life. It is not a five petalled wave and although the whorls are circular they do not have the spiral feel of spirally plants. The whorls feel more like a scattering of energy, light prisms, points of brilliance that beam out into the universe. The most dominant feeling in horsetail, when looking at its shape is this segmentation, this rhythm, and just how neatly all the parts connect to each other and yet how they can be standalone. Its a very lego like cellular feel and sitting here, with horsetail it is easy to see the rhythmic pulse of the sections as they connect up the hollow straw of the stem. The holding and the letting go, the connectivity, horsetail has its sections regulated perfectly, beautifully on display, with spasms of celebration, little explosions pulsing up the plant. Horsetail knows how to support a cellular matrix, all those millions upon millions of cells that dance to the pulse of you. These pondering’s remind me again that horsetail has an integral intelligence about the basic proponents of vitality. That it can be a supportive backbone of vitality and in fact the scratchy alien like ancient silica structure of the plants feels very skeletal. Very foundational.

Horse tail seems almost as if it was an old grandfather elixir with wisdom beyond the ages, ready to support me in my basic cellular needs with everything from structural support to cellular knowing.

Indeed for traditional Chinese medicine practitioners horsetail is considered the elixir of life, named similarly as some of the fungi, it is regarded as a foundational herb to a long and vital life. And as a herb that treats the water element, a herb that is so deeply familiar with water on a time scale that our little brains can barely encompass and yet our hearts and longing can somehow hold the spaciousness off, it is no surprise that this plant is a master of fluid control and collaboration. Therefore we humbly often ask it to help us with our bladder functions, that organ system whose official is one who controls the storage and elimination of fluids. Which I honestly cannot underline the importance of as we are all very fluidey people, composed mostly of intricately arranged and flowing fluids. The organ that releases and holds fluids has a big impact on how the fluids flow within the system and supporting our bladder can go a long way in supporting ourselves.

And now is the time when horsetail emerges again amongst the old ones who were here last year. And it is the young fresh succulent horsetails that I am seeking for my medicine, before they spore, the horsetail who are still somewhat tightly clasped before the whorls have properly unfolded. And if at all possible I want them when they are as juicy as can be, for there is that aspect of horsetail that is in between the water of the world and the land, that wisdom it has with silica, that most inert yet foundational element, and horsetail knows how to build with it and will pass that knowledge onto me in the wateriness of my ways.

As we move from winter into the beginnings of spring, away from the flow of the water element towards the projection of life anew I am asking horsetail to give me strength. To give me endurance. To make me stead fast for the hope of what I am to become. For even though we act this out in a life time, each year we get to practice, we get to be a segment of the eternal spiral, moving from our deep winter slumber, our underground dreams, towards the hope and precarious uprising of spring, where our angry shout of youth will declare ourselves and claim out territories so that we can embrace and choose to open to divine and holy coupling, unity and play, where we flower with touch, where we shine in the beauty of our vital life, where we can pay homage to the mystery so that we can gestate the fullness of ourselves in our belly’s, be satisfied in the nourishment, and become fat with the fruit of our desire and longings that we brith ourselves out and yet again offer it to the earth, to once again, in the stench of death and decay burrow deep into the underground to start anew our winter dreaming.

And as I look into the strangeness of horsetail with its dinosaur remembering, its whorls of fused leaves that dont really photosynthesize, pointing out in all directions as if they belong to some bigger matrix, and indeed its not hard to imagine each end an eye that gazes out into deep space, forever into the universe. This plant that has seen us move from the clay that shaped us, has watched and wondered as we began to flop around and discover this most beautiful world. Has sat with us as consorts while we consulted our medicine keepers of the earth and talked with blood, sweat, tears and dreams to our gods. It has filtered endlessly our water ways from sweet mountain streams to the fecundity of compacted dwellings and great ancient city’s, the industrial age of soot and coke and then onto siphoning isotopes added into the atmosphere and now it no doubt sorts through the pharmaceutical and plastic swamp as it works its magic in our water ways.

Horsetails relationship with silica is one that I covet and diligently ask of it when I am collecting it for medicine, sucking the segments of the straws, absorbing, tasting and feeling the sweet water that resides in between each little joint. Silica is a stubbornly inert material, however it is a building block of life for all things and horsetails ability to manipulate this very hard to make available essential compound is one that can be offered up to us, our bodies and horsetails in and out of each other, side by side.

So it is no surprise that horsetail has a healing touch with connective tissue issues. Paraphrasing from Matthew Wood - we would be encouraged to use horsetail for its ability to support and strengthen structure, from joint, cartilage, bone and skin. For people who suffer from hang nails, toe fungus, split ends, week hair and nails and all the picking and biting that comes with those nail issues as well, so also for strengthening the nervous backbone of people prone to worry and anxiety and the nibbling upon negative thought cycles. For people who embody a bit of the horse spirit of this herbs namesake, that twitch, that hyper sensitivity. And as a master of the flowing streams and underground swamps Horsetail is also used for bladder weakness and as a conjunct, kidney support, as it basically helps us to inform how we manage, filter and keep our own waterways healthy.

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