How I got into locavore Herbalism

How stewardship of the land creates medicine of the people.

I was always a city gal. Constrained in my youth by the lack luster of country amusements I hitch hiked my way out of what appeared to be barren landscape without a glance behind. It was the landscapes of peoples emotions, pulsing expressions and tricky intent that I was fascinated by, these were the interplays that I observed, tasted and fiddled around in. The backdrop was old mostly, northern Europe where “wild” was in the constant peer examination of professional function. The “wild” was in how you found your way to bed at night, how you could sign into oblivion and stumble, fumbling alone, as one, individual and centric. It was not the wild of the woods, the wild of the screaming silent wild, the wild that harbors no sense of human, the wild which as Dr. Martin Shaw says “Disables our capacity to devour in the way the West seems so fond of; in the most wonderful way I can describe, we get devoured” So its been a returning when I found myself back in the country, when I responded to a call from the land, it was an old voice that I’ve heeded, a deep belonging that I’ve needed to stay sane.

“I am the bear” I say to myself as I move along the undergrowth. It’s a big forest I’m walking through. Big enough to get lost in. To loose myself in, to become unknown. To be devoured in in the most wonderful way. Not the constant consumption of human entrapment but something beyond myself. I hear rustling and movement. Everything in me stops and then starts. “I am the bear” I mutter. Ive joked about being devoured enough to know that I might of called it up in some clumsy moment. I am the bear ready to immerse myself into the forest in a way that will open up my synaptic gates, those huxley doors of sense, smell, mind, quiet. More transparent and whole at the same time. I massage the edge of fear with my mantra, looking around the unknown forest. The unknown landscape of strange principles and order. I don’t want to be afraid.

It’s uncomfortable. Trust. Trust that you don’t know the landscape. It takes a while to get to the place where if I saw “one who knows where the honey is “ my first response would be shoo. It takes a while to be waving at the trees, heart lifting at the familiar sights, everyone in their place, lifting limbs up in recognition. It takes a while to step lightly, meandering through, noting new and old, friends. It takes a while to be familiar in the wild even when you are in the unknown. A while to be able to slip into the mindset that comes about meandering through nature.

Which is why, when I am thinking about pertinent information for this monograph, when I think about how to impart to you, good reader, reliable facts and solid handles of knowledge I stumble, mist in my mind as I pull the fluid heart moments through empty grasping hands that simply feel the slippery truth of experience. First off it takes a while.

It takes a while

I started out from my urban decay far from the woods. My first forays into landscapes and local were through gardening, especially permaculture. It made sense to me, permaculture. It also made sense that the landscape was the conductor of the orchestration. The holder of hot, cold, constriction, lax, damp and dry. How the way the plants responded to the shifting, the dipping and the draining, The lay of the land, the bones of the earth and the microscopic dance in play in between all players. The embedded universality. While looking at where my pattern recognition could meander and play within this system of observing living principles; permaculture, I got sucked into the world of perennials and there on found the medicinals. Laziness was key. I am the epitome of the armchair gardener, for as I glanced at my designated clumps of vibrant green offerings that would soon wilt away and scab the winter gardens like picked at ingrown hairs, my pupils would sideways shift towards the forest, the roadside, the unused lot, because I could see on my periphery, i could see that right there was the land already teaming, overladen, perfectly not weeded, joyously yelling, “we are here!”. I could see beautiful vibrant abundant medicinal gardens.

“One of the most important things about permaculture is that it is founded on a series of principles that can be applied to any circumstance. The core of the principles is the working relationships and connections between all things.”Juliana Birnbaum Fox

Leaving my more premeditated efforts to ‘self organize” I started to learn what was around me. Commensurately learning about traditional western medicine, with Matthew Wood’s teaching being a figurative influence, his insight and way of revealing the six tissue states and their definitions slowly awakening my senses as I began to feel the correlation between outside and in. The archway of awareness opening up in my back, letting wispy ancestors walk through as I relaxed into the root of calamus, the intense shiver of quaking aspen and the deep deep call of devils club. “March on good soldier”. These feelings correlated with taste and action but they also all had the nuances of personality. Finding the language of plants found sense in their home. Found sense in the sitting in the grove, seeing who were their friends and hindrances. What inherent knowledge did they behold ? Our senses shared the same horizon.

I started to have a weird relationship with teasel. It’s everywhere here. In the grimiest of places. All over in refuse and drainage. Its a just arrived at the party plant, all seven feet or so, one day in summer suddenly present, arms waving. It happened that I was getting ready for a green gathering in the Gorge. “Bring something for the bundle” the email said. Oh the pressure of this cobbled spirituality (so special so meaningful so doomed!) I was driving the kids to school, mind meandering about what to bring, what special gift I could place in the special bundle, jumping to junipers relationship to the kidneys, letting the consciousness float through, seeing if any attachment became caught in the thought cloud, the kids in the background, radio, traffic lights. As I slide into the mostly empty lot I notice something prostrate and perfectly parallel to the white lines in the parking space beside me. Watching the kids rumble towards the school door I walk around and see this tall brown dried teasel with suspicious indentations similar to tire tracks. “Still all her tassels are in order” I mutter and I’m thinking that she is lucky to hitch a ride for indeed, cinderella, she was off to the offering at the Gorge. I let my mind disengage and I don’t try to understand what my heart feels as I lay her in the station wagon. Wildness, wildness settles in there and I smell the wisps of her fox pelt.

Since then she’s crept right up to my door. Standing tall in the ground, a visiter in the garden. She’s become a good friend. So overwhelmed by emotion I have drunkenly lapped at the pools in her chalice like leaves, laughing at myself when I see all the bugs disintegrating in the bottom. After having repeatedly sprained my ankle for the third time in a year and sick of my current fearful shuffle on bumpy paths I finally remember her relationship with ligaments and reach for the teasel tincture to rub it on. I immediately feel a click as I rub and then in my head a command “jump up and down 3x”. Somewhat startled I do. Another click and crunch in my ankle and I’m dismissed, ankle readjusted, not to spring out of place again. You can’t help but fall in love, stand in awe. Great her in the doorway with gladness in your heart. Mullein was watching over for a while but now the teasels standing guard. The same two st johns wort hang out by the water faucet come June. The lemon balm and peppermint battle it out while the brambles take on my assaults of rage for if I was calm to begin with by the time i’m entrenched in the briar medicine I’m as whipped up as a bob cat in a ball of tenacious yarn. Fighting furiously against all my knots of thought and prejudice, wound up with no generosity for the facets of my animism. I make friends with myself as the brambles slowly release and let me feel what I do not allow myself to feel, to submit, submit to being in the unruly presence of something vaster. That knowledge that comes with interaction.

It takes a while to establish a working relationship

I nibble and munch and smell. I sit and meditate, experiment on my own and with groups, sometimes clarity of insight, green whisperings, sometimes a practice in frustration, despair, self loathing. I think about the scientific correlation with constituents and regularly observed pathologies. I think about the herbal lore, tidbits passed down, experiences shared and I try to tuck markers of this information away, to use, verify, experiment and understand. The left brain is a beloved friend unlike my un trusty right side, ready to cave in a second, palpitations when it brushes with the infinite of being. Being there, in the old lot next door that is brimming with pioneer diversity, being there, just still. Being. Not knowing.

I have a little radio show. It came about when I was stalking some cottonwood on the cold crisp sunny January day, after the storm. Everything about me shivered with clarity. I suddenly slipped into my childhood wonder of watching David Attenborough and his unabashed connectedness to the animal kingdom that he was so avidly reporting on. I giggled to myself at how my prey was so stealthy that movement was barely discernible. More though I was reached back through time by a connected undivided passion, the vibration of absolute delight in being in the wild and no where else. The thought of sharing the story popped into my mind. The ongoing story of our earthy observations. I recorded a 5 minute window of that world into my phone, bashed up an edit and successfully pitched it to my local radio station. Passion honed by discipline, the extra poke through the confusion of this world to go out, go out and wildcraft, make some medicine or not, do a show or two. Open up the windows of our worlds. I would be all eager, jumping out the car, the dog leaping around while I got the phone set to record the show, get it done. This was when I was harvesting rose petals, I stood there, with my phone, talking about the taste, the astringency, the different parts blah blah thankfully these snippets need only be five minutes in total. Still I felt satisfied. I had imparted the information. I had covered some succinct points, got some good tips in. Rose vinegar sun burn splash with st johns for good measure. How wonderful! Something extra for the listeners. I set to picking petals. The patch I have always harvested from is large and profound, dog rose in great families’ of trailing tangling patches. Bushes upon bushes set a bit back from the ocean inlet, gracefully held in a huge horseshoe embrace of madrone, alders and cedar. Boggy land with dry sandy hillocks, salty with big breaks of hogweed and hemlock, yarrow and yellow dock with wild carrot to come. So plentiful that I do not have to embrace the thorns, that I can pick a years worth of medicine by grazing on the edges. Meandering, grasping the petals, four or five only with each bud. A slow business, grasp, gently pull and place into the bag, so hypnotic this becomes that there is high danger of missing the open bag on your arm altogether, petals trailed behind you like a tripping Grettle. Hands slightly sticky with the scent, the fragrance becoming more than a cloud of invisible pollen, the scent becoming a path to walk through, a realm to embrace. Grasp, pick, place, stop, gaze. Grasp pick place stop gaze. How are the tent caterpillars this year I wonder, noting the flux and ebb, how are the territories this year? Noting the growth and set backs, how is the essence this year? Lots of sun, and there will be sweet nectar, or early bloom, more astringent slightly dryer, off into a flow of being, not needing to think to know, body comparing, registering the slow yearly progression where rose and I meet again. Time reduced to nothing, just us in our conjunction, our act of love. Again wondering abstract thoughts that balloon like baby spiders drifting upwards while my heart slowly starts to aspire and open, to lift and rise, to encompass the whole of my body. I pause. Ive been picking for a few hours. I notice I am extremely enhanced. I am very different. It suddenly occurs to me that now I have to record the show to talk about rose. Five minutes of heartfelt longing on the meaning of trust. My listeners will have to google for the vinegar sun burn rinse.

It takes a while to establish a working relationship which you then cherish and revisit over and over.

The very fact that I can get a general action from a general taste allows me to drift and meander through my neighborhood of plants, the leap from the page into the meeting, this casual acquaintance is key since there is something greater than knowing going on here. Ah yes bitters - good for gall etc. Rather it is a reaching in. Into something other than yourself. Knowing is hardly more than delusional, far more somatic. Using the tastes and the observations of the landscapes that the plants grow in allow me to understand where they might be more helpful. Maybe. What inherent intelligence have they gained? Is the yarrow on the beach different from the one on the mountain? I go off in search and then I have the medicine, neatly labeled “yarrow 5000 feet” “yarrow beach” yet the variables are so contrary and the scientific method that I’m practicing bogus. It isn’t as effective as I want it to be. Or neat. Definitely not as predictable, strangely like I’m describing myself. I truly appreciate the rigors and exacting observations and gatherings, reading the blood, understanding physiological process, the endless depth of knowledge that I see in herbalism. I constantly am stretching my self into the realm of language, variables, parameters, process, cause and effect, the delicate multi play of interactions, the exacting absence of mystery. The delightful depth of knowing. My understanding that this perspective is extremely successful in healing. Yet I also know that it’s simply the practitioners way. If a practitioner remains faithful to what they understand and how they perceive they will be helpful in transferring the medicine of the land as the medicine of the people. Remain faithful to how you understand and the patterns will fall into place, the invisible lines of causality will become clear, your moral themes and prudence learnt over time will take play. I learnt this with my practice as it became my own. I learnt this with medicine making. My good friend loves to dry the plants all up, grind the crap out them and there they sit, the clumpy grey or ochre mess seemingly gelatinized in the bottom of oversized jars. And not even for the sake of consistency, it was a personal calling; these slavic blocks of grey matter. I was secretly appalled. I would look at my tightly packed to the brim, fresh, colorful plants squeezed in their mason jars like old fashioned carnival exhibits sitting next to hers like a world summit of east meets west yet her medicine - so different from mine. So effective and so different. Thankfully she follows her path, her way of understanding as I do, as we compare and take notes. Envy and delight in our successes and learning mistakes.

It takes a while to establish a working relationship which you then cherish and revisit over and over. As you get to know the land, the land gets to know you and you get to know yourself.

The madrona is out there on the edge. I can view her from many different points of reference. I can see her in different walks of my life, my ex’s house across the bay where a lifetime ago I would do the dishes looking out over the view, the neighborhood beach where I look up the 200’ to see her there swaying almost horizontal, ever reaching or from the forest edge where she hangs, root tusks dug in an iron like grip on the cliff face, beckoning me to really experience her medicine and for once lightly dance up her massive trunk so that I can fully embrace her boughs as we levitate above the crashing surf. I wonder if I will arrive at one of these vantage points to find her transformed. Gone. Sacrificed, Fallen. Our perspective of time is so vastly different from the forest that it hinders me in my judgement. I hug my fellow wild crafters bemoaning the very pervasive medicine of the blackberries consuming their shrinking patch of diversity while I hug my fellow wild crafters celebrating the life saving honey bee blossom of the same infamous “invasive”. Land nurture - Self nurture. Its up to us to find our true north. Madrona, light seeker shows me that for ever she has been there and one day she will never be. If I start to feel frustrated or hurried in the forest, junk lot, embankment I stop. It’s taken me while in this learning for I am as effective as I’m impatient. Elder was a harsh teacher, breaking of in great branches of exasperation if I started to expedite the flower gathering, her sweet umbels creamy white against the splinters of her form. Shame flooding through me, the hypocrisies of my intentions. The rubbish of my medicine yet the knowing that I can grow and move on. Improve and learn about the balance and the nourishment, find the right form, the right fit. Some years there are no berries. “What no Angelica!” I exclaim to one of my favorite medicine makers. “Damn you!” “Get over it” she says. “The patch needs a break. What do you want? That we should start tincturing shipped in herbs? Completely change our modus operandi for your need?” “No angelica then” I murmur in agreement. I buy her medicine because of relationship. Not because its better or more effective but its just my way, its the way that the land has taught me. I caress the thin paper bark of fierce Madrona. She who houses eagles for they love to plunge into the Salish Sea from her perfectly placed branches high above. As for myself I have to lie on my belly and slowly slither to the edge of the cliff reaching out to grasp the offerings of her bark, I have a long way to go before I can wander out there and collect her leaves. The thought of stewarding the Madrona and her offspring seems ludicrous. Who am I to know. What could I possible know? But the point of contact is everything. The line that is drawn out from one point to another creates a dimension and that is the relationship that we have entered into. That is the relationship that I can honor, fail, foul and get up to improve again. The dimension of story, memory, remembrance and hope.

It takes a while to establish a working relationship which you then cherish and revisit over and over. As you get to know the land, the land gets to know you and you get to know yourself. You will neither judge one another if you want to observe and learn, each providing strength to the others existence by entering into story.