for whatever comes
January bled grey rain, cold and constant. River through the garden swelling, flooding bog meadow, more… water creeping towards the house in mud puddles and gushes. I blanketed myself in work, in its layers — editing, admin, new web pages, newsletters…
Rain in the night, pebbles on the attic windows. But inside, the wind at my back was hot. Drying and fierce… flames through joints, skin, eyes. I pared back the days of midwinter. Pacing. Remember pacing.
The further I travel with the herbs, the more uneasy I am with ideas that we can consume a plant as a product that does X, cures Y, with the notion that if we ‘use’ nature correctly we will be fixed (and, by extension, become better ‘products’ ourselves)
Recently in a workshop, a friend asked:
How can I be in right relationship with the plants? How can I be with them in a state that goes beyond constant petition… like I am always asking for something? Wisdom, oxygen, answers. How can I come with blessings of my own to give to nature? What do I have to offer?
Work calls and a hot wind desiccates. Slow down. Nothing is urgent. Guard time. No more than two evenings a week for work. For a time it holds. Not cure. So often a myth. It holds. The herbs cradling, containing… Wholeness not cure.
To ask the question of how we relate, not merely extract and take; how we offer, goes to the heart of the false dichotomy between nature and humanity. I said to my friend:
Listen. Attention is prayer.
Awake at night. Pain in knee. Skin flaring in plaques. Lymph congealing in an ankle that pulses. Rib cartilage blazing its tenderness. Eyes gritty, sore. The unslept hours a conversation with the forest beyond my window, the river that never sleeps, the owls that listen for food, call: this place is alive, we persist. Trust the dark.
Illness is not simply disharmony between the self and the natural order (a though we were ever separate from the animate world). If only ‘healing’ were as easy as engaging in fresh-air, cold bathing, temperance, particular diets, fasting or… Some of these things might help some of us, some of the time, but our physical health is not a reflection of moral and spiritual purity.
Those who are not healed, those who are disabled or live with chronic conditions, are not doing it wrong. Those who die did not lose a battle. We are mortal, fragile, soft-bodied. We feel. We take in emotions, pollutants. We have lives that make too many demands.
We are the sum of so many influences and calls. We tire, overwork, menstruate, feel emotional strain, give birth, suffer injuries, live through a pandemic, experience bereavement, navigate financial crises, failing healthcare systems, lose houses and jobs, sometimes countries…
By day, the owls fold into tree hollows, press close to the bark of ivy-clad trunks, fluff feathers, trap heat. They keep to their place. Endure. I too am going nowhere but home.
It is false when those selling us herbs or any part of nature as ‘the answer’ tell us: If you do the right things, your body will comply. If it does not, the failure is yours.
You may live attentively, gently, wisely and still may get ill and your worth is not diminished by this.
To live in balance with the animate world, is as political as it is personal. At some time each of us bears the brunt of this disharmony in our tender bodies.
Owls, susurration of water, rain in the trees, hum of my blood — a kind of liturgy — small voices keeping faith with the world. Perhaps this is what the body in the midst of a lupus flare asks — not cure, not always sleep, but presence. I listen and the forest answers.
I am scrabbling towards a new language. 44,000 years ago, perhaps longer, the oldest rock art created by humans depicts figures half-animal, half-human — therianthropes. The therianthropes hunting pigs and buffaloes (anoas) with spears and ropes.
On the cave walls, paintings of ancestors who knew themselves to be animal, who lived within the animate world as part of, not other, not over… a species among many. How do we speak language from within nature?
Late January, my torso and breasts bloom lesions, papules, wheals spring from the tiniest capillary blood spots. A language of ‘mast-cell degranulation’, ‘classic lupus vascular reactivity’, as cold as rain.
Another tongue. Aloe cools. Plantain and nettle leaf soothe the histamine response. Violet goes to the heart, essence of softening, cool not chill, letting grief flow. Calendula, cornflower, marshmallow gentling lymph, linden moistening what winter has drained.
Do not say: If you learned to regulate better, you’d improve. Say rather: The language of the nervous system describes, rather than prescribes; supports, rather than demands; accompanies care…
What story do you want to live? What story do you want to write?
I have been wintering a story that is not a journey arc of triumphant recovery. It did not come complete with a moral lesson.
How have you wintered?
I am reaching for words of maintenance, what is possible and holds, a language of grief and how we negotiate it. Phrases of pacing, adapting, keeping faith with the body that is home, real and messy… evolving…
Writing in Emergence Magazine, Vol 6, Seasons, in the article, ‘Wildflower Beauty and the Search for Home’, David George Haskell reminds us,
What do plants do when life gets hard? Strew the world with floral beauty.
He talks about the delicacies of these flowering bodies, their susceptibility to temperature, seasons, light… How imperfect conditions often are for them. But in the midst of challenge and imperfection, they adapt, make beauty from what is, as Haskell says,
There are many ways to make a home in the seasons.
Along this winding path, the herbs accompany us — radical attention, unsentimental presence. They walk with us as witnesses to bodies that are not projects to be optimised but sites of experience in all its uncertainty and contradiction.
In this season of Imbolc, on the edge of winter, the threshold of spring.
No matter how harsh, winter holds the future.
Attend to your love.
Remember your nest.
Keep faith with the body you are.
Make beauty whatever the season.
Survival is how we prepare for the light, for whatever comes next.