musings on journalling, a new year and herbal allies
Light pours into the attic. Through the the slanted windows the sky is palest sapphire, sharp as ice, a cold-bright wash around the liquid glow of the low winter sun. It’s eleven degrees in our bedroom and when I peer into the garden the ground is snow-salted, the trees glistening with frost.
Journalling through the waters
January started wet and stormy, water bubbling up through the cracked concrete of the basement floor, leaking in through the walls that dip beneath the water table until it became a stream filling the channel that my son-in-law dug the previous winter, out into the field that had become a lake, the river that swirls through our garden breaking her banks in wild elation.
Like many people, I do a lot of journalling in January, reflecting back and moving forward. It spreads over days or weeks and I usually have a sense of flow and direction, but this year I felt constricted. The channels were blocked. I was aware that part of me wasn’t letting the flow happen because another part of me knew perfectly well how I wanted to plan the next year while my logistical, responsible self wanted to put the brakes on taking any risks.
The day the garden waters rose, we had news of a death. Grief and the water element are powerful companions. Last year when the water rose, almost lapping around the base of the house at one side as well as pouring out of the basement from the other side, it felt threatening. But this year I knew this house had been built around its watery environment and the deluge was a release. I filled a journal in two weeks, helped by some astute and insightful questions from my yoga nidrā mentor as well as the wild catalyst of the river.
I’m not someone who makes resolutions because they seem to me to be too tick-box and too likely to set myself up for failure. But each year I set out to discern what in my current life is setting the tone of the year. In 2023 it was ‘connection’. The previous year the tone was set by constantly coming back to the idea of the path.
Finding the tone
This year I began exploring what the tone of the year might be as the skies grew even darker at night, just before the new moon. I started from two questions that I constantly return to:
- what needs more?
- what needs less?
From there I thought about hopes and dreams, about what makes my heart sing and about areas in my life that need support or change or both. As I journalled, certain ideas and words kept recurring—some expected and some more surprising. One of the surprises was writing about a need to retreat — I’m someone who periodically needs time alone in silence, but this felt stronger. Perhaps it was a response to a year in which there had been a lot of health challenges for me and close loved ones, or to the overwhelm of an increasingly insane world, politically and ecologically… And yet another part of me very much does not want to be in retreat.
The idea of movement was also strong — the need to keep the rhythm of my walking practice and add more exercise to my days, but also the association of movement to transformation — always becoming a different story.
Another recurring thought was around tenderness. I’ve been thinking a great deal recently about how desperate the world is to have more tenderness. I’m also someone who can push myself too hard so maybe my unconscious was suggesting I give myself more tenderness. But much as I warmed to these ideas, I also found myself reacting against the idea of being tender in the sense of being bruised and wounded. Of course we all carry wounds, on our bodies and in our spirits. And I want to be porous to what life brings. But I don’t want to lack healthy boundaries or to be fragile and brittle.
But could this year be about what I tend to? ‘Tend’ can be an imperative so there is a sense of taking action and the Latin root (tendere) has the sense of reaching for something. Stretching, extending, aiming, holding a course for a particular direction… all these are within tendere.
The idea of extension fitted with my need for movement—physical movement in my daily rhythms but also the constant need we all have to extend our learning and growth. And the association with having a direction chimed with my question from two years ago about finding and being the path with an added link to tenacity—the determination to stay on the path.
The French root (tendre) added another layer. It has the meaning of ‘to stretch’ again in the sense of what we lean towards (as in ‘tendency’), but also ‘to hold forth’ in the the sense of ‘offering’. ‘To tend’ can be to offer, to give, a concept of reaching out to others to balance the focus on my own journey. There is service. Tending is caring and herbalists are certainly called to tend to those seeking help from the herbs. The associations of offering and healing are also found in the longer form of the word—’attend’. What am I paying attention to, directing my energies towards, listening to, caring for?
The stretching of mind, heart and emotions; the sense of a journey that has direction; the elements of service, offering and healing, and the focus on what we truly listen to and give our energies to cohered around asking myself ‘what are you tending?’
Connecting with values
My guiding principals in working with writers have been attention and connection. Slowing down enough to hear what others are saying, what the forest is communicating, what my body needs… and connecting deeply with what we hear — this is what we tend to. And in my herbal work the question ‘how do you want to feel?’ is another process of deep attention, mining through the presenting symptoms to the heart of what someone is asking of the plants. This is work that I love — accompanying those on journeys of transformation, whether they are working with the alchemy of writing or healing herbs or both to become a different story.
It’s also the work I’m engaged in for my own journey. I don’t trust gurus and their overtones of celebrity and hierarchy. I believe in being a perpetual student and for that I need wise companions who I trust as mentors. I’m also convinced that anyone in a mentoring or teaching role should equally be a mentee, just as a therapist would be expected to have a supervising therapist.
My mentors include a wise yoga nidrā practitioner who is also a gifted healer and activist and my herbal mentors. They also include the plants themselves. Recently, for one of my herbal courses, it was suggested that over the year we choose 12 herbs, one for each month, and spend time with the particular plant daily. I knew I could quickly have option anxiety and want 20 or 30 plants on the list so I made myself write the list quickly and intuitively, letting twelve plants simply show up.
Tending to plantain
There were some familiars and some surprises and I’ve begun the year with plantain. Each day of January I’m spending some time with this herb — in the garden or forest where this hardy plant grows undaunted by winter; in a tea that has no other herbs, or in a few drops of tincture held on the tongue.
Plantain is a hard-working herb and often a first aid herb. Although it is thought of as a common weed, it’s been used for hundreds of years across many cultures. The Anglo-Saxons held plantain as one of their nine sacred herbs due to its great healing powers. It’s helpful for wounds, bruises, boils and to reduce the swelling of rheumatic pains. They would also chew the roots to relieve toothache and heat the leaves to place on wounds. It can be used topically to treat insect bites and stings and applied to scalds and wounds, providing pain relief, as well as decreasing minor bleeding due to its styptic action. And it is used internally to relieve coughs, bronchitis, sore throat, laryngitis, urinary infections and digestive problems. I use this safe and gentle herb in vinegars to flavour food, infused in oil to put into balms, and in an anithistamine tea with nettle and other herbs for seasonal allergies.
But the point of spending significant time with each herb is to meet it as another being, to discover things that we might not find in herbal monographs. When we get to know a person we don’t usually start by reading about them. We are not in search of data but an encounter that helps us to understand the person. This takes time and attention—so I have been daily tending to plantain. When I drink the tea or take drops of the tincture, where do I feel it travel to in the body? Is it warming or cooling? Bitter or sweet? Which of my senses does it touch? How does it feel?
For the first few days I experienced what I expected because my mind was already full of facts. I tasted the bitterness of plantain, a characteristic that I know makes it a helpful herb for the digestion, stimulating the liver to make digestive juices and astringing the gut. I felt the coolness and moistness of the plant, attributes that make it a soothing remedy for the throat and lungs. Gradually I felt more of where the plant travelled in my body—throat, lungs and stomach certainly, but also lower, which reminded me that plantain is also an ally for the urinary system.
Tended by plantain
Nothing much changed as I recorded my daily encounters and then, on the same day that I’d been journalling about the tone of the year and exploring what I want to tend to in the coming year, something shifted. In the time of the month when the moon (so strongly associated with waters and tides) was dark, as I listened to the owl hooting into the night in the garden, I felt the drops of plaintain cool every bit of me within.
In my throat was a cool elasticity. And if you have ever picked a plantain leaf you’ll have seen that its veins are like elastic threads, something that gives the herb the ability to bounce back even when trodden. I felt my breath lightening and cooling, throat soothed and airways cleared and the cool clearing descended into my lungs. At the darkest time of the month, I felt held by this earthy, bitter, humble plant, held and tended to. It was not only me attending to plantain, but plantain attending to me. I had a sense that this stretchy, resilient plant, understood that there would be a shadow side to a year of tending, understood that I have an tendency to over-extend myself, to stretch too thin. I had a sense of being told (without words) to take care to tend without over-reaching to breaking point: tend, but also be tended. My whole body felt cool and comfortable, attended to and grateful.
We had become more intimate through our slow daily meetings, and the next day brought another surprise. I sat with a pot of plantain tea and the first cup felt familiar, but with the second a wave of grief washed over me, strong and disorienting. I wanted to weep and had no idea why.
I was so thrown that I went back to my books — plantain as a digestive, a soothing demulcent, a wound healer… Nothing about plantain for grief and it’s not a nervine herb — not something that you would give for anxiety or sadness, sleeplessness or stress. And yet? The reaction of welling up had been powerful and the sense of reaching into some locked away sorrow, profound.
And then I thought about plantain being a herb that moves the lymph in the body, that moves the internal waters and so helps with inflammation. And plantain as an antihistamine that helps with watering eyes but is also moistening. Why wouldn’t a plant that is so associated with lymph and water also act on the emotions, represented by the water element?
It’s an understanding of plantain that I would never have reached through reading, internet searches, lectures… And an amazing gift that this easily overlooked ‘weed’ tapped into deep parts of me—the need not to over-stretch, the need to be held as well as holding, the grief that I have not yet processed… Water energy has been all around me this January — the dark moon, saying goodbye to my daughter after the midwinter pause (having not seen her for three years and knowing it will be at least another two till we are in the same room again), listening to the owl in the garden, journalling my way to finding the tone of this year.
The morning after my deep encounter with plantain, it had snowed, a rarity in this part of Brittany. The snow-light a ray of clarity.
Light pours into the grenier.