Tomorrow night’s workshop is The Basics of Herbcraft, presented by yours truly. We’ll talk about core principles of medicine making, with a special eye for branching out, being creative and developing your craft. We’ll specifically talk about infusions, decoctions, infused oils, salves and alcohol tinctures. I put together a short & sweet 12-page booklet of what we’ll be talking about for participants. It includes methods recipes, tips & tricks. For those of you not in attendance and want to obtain one, here’s the .pdf file for you to print, peruse and distribute as you see fit.

https://rapidshare.com/files/3895861965/Final_Herbcraft_Booklets.pdf

It’s hosted on Rapidshare, and I assure you it’s not sketchy. Alternatively, if that doesn’t work, you can find the file here on GoogleDocs, no sign-in required. Print 2-sided, short-edge binding. Then you’re good to go! Enjoy, and see you tomorrow!

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I’m inspired to write about this because we’re in the season of Water. In Chinese 5-element medicine, Winter is the season of Water–the season and element of cleansing, restoration, gathering reserves for the rapid growth in the springtime. Water holds and conducts energy and intention. So when you need some deep medicine, what better way than to immerse yourself in such a restorative medium?

There are a few ways to bathe with herbs:

1. Herbs loose in the bathtub. Little fuss, just toss herbs in and let them go. I personally don’t use this method if there are small plant parts–it’s a strange sensation to have tiny plant pieces in your nether regions and a true nuisance to clean up. I pass.
2. Herbs in a muslin bag in the bathtub. Just get a medium to large cloth bag and tuck some loose herbs into it and let it steep in the tub. (You can also do a makeshift bag by taking a section of cloth and tying it with a rubber band.)
3. Herbs steeped and strained in a pot on the stove, then poured in the bath. I have to boil water on the stovetop because my water heater is too small. So I usually tie up a bag of herbs or a couple handfuls of branches to be infused while I’m at it. I really like this method.
4. Flower or tree essence in the bath. Adding a few drops directly to the bathwater. Flower and tree essence have an affinity for the emotional and spiritual bodies, and have a special affinity for water. Something special happens when you add them to the bath. Have good intentions when you’re working with these.
5. Essential oils in the bath. Besides catering to and enlightening our senses, essential oils have medicinal properties. Combining them with a little vegetable glycerine or milk helps them dissolve in the water, rather than float on the top and evaporate.

We’re in deep Winter, and most gathering trips entail visits to the evergreen forests. Naturally, working with tree medicine during Winter comes easily. I especially like working with trees in baths. There’s something about tree leaves infused in water your bathing in that makes you feel like you’re being held by the trees themselves.

by Mary Vaux Walcott

It’s really wonderful to get to know Western Red Cedar, if you dont already. This tree is revered in the Northwest rainforests as a giver of life and provider of nourishment. Salish peoples used Thuja plicata for food, medicine, tools, houses, canoes, incense and art materials. Medicinally, T. plicata has antifungal and antiviral properties and can be helpful in conditions of rheumatism, immune depression and coughs. Western Red Cedar can be dried and drank as a tea, infused into oil, tinctured and used in baths. This is a special plant to me, as it was the first plant I got to know on a deep level. The one that opened up the rabbit hole of plant work.

I especially like baths with Western Red Cedar. Here’s the bath I like to do. I like making a mineral bath salt blend. The epsom salts are detoxifying and soothing to tissues. The white clay and borax contain a lot of minerals that nourish & soothe the skin. These earthy elements also ground the experience and pair nicely with plants. (You can substitute freely as you like. Hydrosols, essential oils and spagyrics are definitely very special and may be hard to come by or out of some people’s budgets. They’re a nice addition but not necessary.) So here’s what I do:

1. Brew a tea on the stove of cedar fronds using one of the methods above.
2. While that’s brewing, I mix the salts. In a bowl, I mix together with a spoon or whisk: 1 cup epsom salts, 2T borax, 2T white clay (found at natural food stores or Mountain Rose Herbs), 3 drops Western Red Cedar tree essence, 7 drops Western Red Cedar essential oil, drizzle of vegetable glycerine or milk (this helps the essential oil dissolve in water). 
3. Assemble the Bathroom of Awesomeness: light candles, burn some incense, get a book, grab a glass of water or tea, set the bowl of salts near the tub.
4. When the bath tea is done brewing, pour it into the tub. Pour in the salts, mixing it through with good intentions and prayers to the Water, Earth minerals and Western Red Cedar.
5. When you’re ready, get in! Relax, flutter about, reclaim your mermaid or merman self. Let you mind drift and wander.
6. When you’re through, thank the Water, the Earth and the plants. Let the water drain and send it off with blessings for all the bodies of water in your region and on the planet. We’re quite lucky to have access to all this fresh water, so let’s keep that in mind.

Other herbs I like use in the bath are fir, spruce or hemlock boughs, Cottonwood/poplar leaves, Willow leaves, Mugwort. And the sky is truly the limit. Use whatever you are called to! Here are some more ideas & practices around bathing:

• Skin brushing is a great thing to add before bathing. It stimulates the lymphatic system and circulation, and primes the skin quite nicely for some good soakin’. (There’s a good article here about it.)
• Afterwards, put on something really great. Your favorite jammies. Something that smells good.
• Crystals and water have a special affinity to each other. Have some lovely specimens? Have them join the party.
• Get something nice to drink. Fresh well water, wine/cordial, syrup or tea. Healing inside & out. Get a good book too. I like reading something ethereal, like philosophy or fiction. I don’t exactly like reading auto parts catalogs or my phone bills in the bathtub.
• Soak for at least 20 minutes. That way, you can take in all the medicine.
• Use numbers intentionally with formulating. I like odd numbers for clearing and moving, even numbers for stabilizing. So I’ll use 3 herbs, 7 drops of essential oil. You get the idea.
• American hoodoo and Rootwork traditions have a practice called a 9-Herb bath. That is, an herb formula consisting of 9 herbs, brewed into a tea, and poured over the head that many times while praying.  Manufacturers keep their formulas secret. I use 9 plants that are sacred to me, and the practice remains the same. 7 and 13-herb variations exists.
• Foot baths area easy, and are especially good at the end of the day. They are very helpful for drawing tension out of the head. Mugwort, Western Red Cedar, Lavender, Thyme footbaths are all transformative.
• For really sore muscles and bones (the kind that need more than a soak and oil rub), try soaking some washcloths in mugwort or cedar tea and heating them on low in the oven. Then work them into areas of soreness, pain or inflammation (if heat won’t aggravate it). It’s really nice.

Looking for more posts? Rebecca at King’s Road Apothecary has a great post on the Indian practice of abyangha, or hot oil bathing, and I’m officially hooked on it. Ananda Wilson at Plant Journeys had a great idea–using your leftover marc for bath tea. She details other uses for the marc too. Check it out.

Related posts:

1. Blood Tea and Red String

“If natural diversity is the wellspring of human intelligence, then the systematic destruction inherent in contemporary technology and economics is a war against the very sources of mind . . . It is impossible to unravel natural diversity without undermining human intelligence as well.” -E.O. Wilson

Articulations are powerful. Good articulations shape our thinking and actions. And many years ago, Erich Fromm made a great one: Biophilia: the love of life or living systems. He first used it to describe a psychological orientation of being attracted to all that is alive and vital.

Edward O. Wilson has been a prominent and inspiring voice for global biodiversity and an advocate for human’s intimate connection with the natural world. He resurrected the idea in the 1980′s and set it free into current Naturalistic thought with his 1984 book Biophilia. He cites it as the force behind human’s inherent affinity for living things. Furthermore, our natural love of life is the very thing that sustains it. It’s a product of our co-evolution with all of the species on Earth.

Biophilia. Do you not feel it as you’re lazily wandering a forest, intoxicated by the scent of conifer needles and cradled by the soft dirt? Or maybe as you’re petting the soft & buttery Calendula petals, or lovingly digging up yellow dock roots? Herbalism is biophilia in action. Herbalists are biophiles. Biophilia’s a lovely word and a terrific articulation of the basic need for humans to have relationships and connections with other life forms. 

And maybe our task as a race is to pursue these relationships further. Here’s Wilson on the future of humanity and biodiversity:

Humanity needs a vision of an expanding and unending future. This spiritual craving cannot be satisfied by the colonisation of space. The other planets are inhospitable and immensely expensive to reach. The nearest stars are so far away that voyagers would need thousands of years just to report back. The true frontier for humanity is life on earth, its exploration and the transport of knowledge about it into science, art and practical affairs. Life around us exceeds in complexity and beauty anything else humanity is ever likely to encounter.

A good articulation indeed.

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There are so many dimensions of our connection and relationship with our ecological communities. So many physical forms that this symbiosis takes: We ingest local food for nourishment and local plants to maintain health; Nurture and tend the land. There’s another subtle, deep and very alluring dimension to our relationship with Nature and her other life forms: its touch and texture.

Think about how many of your senses are engaged when you’re IDing a tree. Or harvesting nettle tops, calendula flowers or dandelion roots. You’re attention is brought to subtle shifts in colors, odors, temperature, texture. You engage corporeal and nonordinary senses–things you don’t necessarily use when running errands and working at a desk. Engaging these subtle senses expands our selves and strengthens our connection with ecological community.

As a species, we evolved this way: touching leaves, digging roots, gathering berries, being with people, laughing and stirring soup. Sunlight. Barefeet. Since the industrial revolution, human environments have deviated from natural ones. Instead of touching bark, we’re touching plastic. Instead of walking through forests, we’re sitting in offices.

I think about this when I’m out searching for a particular tree, garbling leaves and smelling the poplar buds. This is what makes this work really beautiful and nourishing to the soul. There’s nothing like skin-leaf contact, foot-earth connection. (In fact, Ryan Drum wrote an article on the micronutrients that are ingested by touching leaves. It’s a good read.)

Through our organoleptic senses, we also learn more about these plants than what’s written in books. (For anyone interested in learning how to use your senses to learn about plants, I highly recommend Kiva’s course on Herbal Energetics.)

So pay special notice to how you’re touching plants, how you’re feeling the electricity of the Earth through your feet, how you connect with life through your skin and Spirit. Mind the textures, temperatures and subtleties.

 I’ll end this with something my friend Rebecca of King’s Road Apothecary posted yesterday:

This is your friendly daily reminder to get your feet onto the earth, barefoot if possible. Wiggle your toes and maybe even get some dirt on your feet. And then, while you’re at it, take a deep breath and let the earth soak into your body. *nodnod* It’s worth dirty toes, I promise.

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The Lost Language of Plants: The Ecological Importance of Plant Medicines to Life on Earth by Stephen Harrod Buhner

Buhner’s a great writer, and I’ve really been inspired about how he’s incorporated systemic thinking and complexity theory into human-plant relationships. In this book, he describes a variety of aspects of the flora kingdom’s role in the greater planetary picture–from biophilia to the ecological impacts of industrial medicine. Thought-provoking and beautiful.

The Genius Within: Discovering the Intelligence of Every Living Thing by Frank Vertosick

I just started reading this. I think how we characterize intelligence is a crucial issue, and informs how we order and classify life forms and determines how we treat other living things. So maybe how we define and frame intelligence deserves more consideration. Plant folks, you’ll love this!

Why We Get Sick: The New Science of Darwinian Medicine by Randolph Nesse & George Williams

For practitioners and folks working in the medical field, if you are eager to geek out on some pathology theory, grab a copy of this book. It’s a great summary of a new perspective slowly making its way into medical thought: evolutionary medicine. Evolutionary medicine is simply applying an evolutionary trajectory to pathogenesis and considering human origins and development when considering disease origins and treatments. Fantastic! I’m reviewing these for my thesis.

Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature by Janine Benyus

For the readers that are coming from the design field, you already know this one. Janine Benyus and the Biomimicry Institute have done a lot to transform our thinking and design processes by drawing inspiration from natural processes. This has big implications and opens up many opportunities to create products, organizations and systems that are more natural.

A Natural History of the Senses by Diane Ackerman

A classic that’s been on my shelf for years that I’m now coming back to. Diane Ackerman’s a stellar author and takes us on a vivid description of the sensory life throughout history. And we all know how important engaging all the sense are. So if you haven’t exposed yourself to this gem, now’s the time.

Here’s to the growth and expanse of mind, heart & spirit during this mystical Winter season!

Related posts:

1. Winter 2011 Reading List

Jesse Bransford, Hecterion (2009)

Whatever it is, best follow it. Cultivating and honoring your innate curiosities about the world, life, society and yourself brings you closer to your true work and encourages the emergence of true self.

Many folks that I look up to and admire for their contributions valued curiosity—letting the mind be free, to pursue its interests & engage with life! People often attribute their success or accomplishments to the fact that they’re so danged curious and pursued an important question—and less about their actual abilities or other advantages.

For me—I’m really curious about the human condition and how working with plants relates to our architecture of the future. Likewise, I’m extremely interested in the mysteries of human origins and dynamics of interspecies relationships/communication. I’m also curious about the implications of design processes for this work.

Honestly, I don’t quite know sometimes how that fits into my activities or professional direction, but that doesn’t matter. Letting the important and deep questions unfold is what I’m going for. It’ll come together at some point.

If you’re bored, you’ve become distant from what makes you curious, excited & geeking out about life. And I think you should work on reconnecting to your curiosity and passion.

What does make you curious, and how’s that reflected in your work?

Curiosity about life in all of its aspects, I think, is still the secret of great creative people. -Leo   Burnett

I have no special talents. I am only passionately curious. -Albert Einstein

Gennady Privedentsev

Related posts:

1. The Congress for Curious People: April 9-18, 2010

Regeneration (2011) by Toshiyuki Enoki

It’s a terribly chilly day here in Olympia. I’ve spent most of the day at my desk, drinking puerh tea, brow furrowed in intense contemplation over some aspects of my developing thesis. I’m exploring the question of the contribution of ethnobotanical knowledge & practices to public health and I face a number of challenges. And chief of these challenges is dealing with the conceptual frame and definition of health itself. There are many ways to define health and the cultural variations are plenty. Here are some:

World Health Organization. 1948. Preamble to the Constitution of the World Health Organization.
The first lines of the Preamble declare, “in conformity with the Charter of the United Nations, that . . . [h]ealth is a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity.”

Dubos, René. 1959. Mirage of health. New York: Harper & Row.
Health is “the expression of the extent to which the individual and the social body maintain in readiness the resources required to meet the exigencies of the future.”

Murray, Kay, Waltner-Toews, & Raez-Luna. (2002). Linking human and ecosystem health on the amazon frontier. In Conservation medicine: Ecological health in practice. 
Defines the ecosystem approach to health: health is the ability to meet socially-determined goals.

Mirriam Webster 2011.
Health is the condition of being sound in body, mind, or spirit.

And there are many more. The WHO definition is currently the one most widely embraced by the medical establishment.

But what’s interesting here is that the definition health is focused on and oriented to the individual. But what if we think about it this way: given that we live in a world of social and ecological connectedness, is it really the right perspective to have to designate one individual as healthy? Doesn’t that cut out a large portion of the picture? Maybe we need to start taking into account environment, context and the larger system when we consider a being’s state of health. The WHO Determinants of Health model gives the beginning of a framework to consider the social and environmental factors that affect health, and can lead to a positive and more effective public health policy (as opposed to our very expensive disease-management system).

I do see more practitioners and thinkers leaving behind the ‘Health=Good/Illness=Bad’ dichotomy that’s plagued allopathic and naturopathic systems of medicine alike. That’s a good thing, given that being stuck in this linear spectrum is not really working for anybody. (See my recent post on Polarities and Paradoxes.)

So here’s the big question for today: what does a definition of health look like that is in accord with socioecological interconnectedness? I mean, what are we really going for here with our clinical practices, social change work and activism? What’s the vision?

Maybe if we can articulate a new vision for health that honors our inherent interconnectedness, we’d start to have sound social structures and health systems that actually work.

Maurice Pillard Verneuil, from Combinaisons ornementales.

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Concept design for space station by Don Davis.

The event was fascinating. Whoopi Goldberg narrated the planetarium show, which stands out as some of the best science storytelling I’ve seen yet. I saw what plants dinosaurs ate, the Virgin Atlantic model planes for space tourism, models for lunar elevators, space station garden designs, the model for the space port currently in development in Las Cruces, NM, how we might deal with an asteroid, what to do when the sun burns out and the 1000-year plan for terraforming Mars into a second Earth.

Art by Stefan Morrell. Sources: Christopher McKay, NASA Ames Research Center; James Graham, University of Wisconsin–Madison; Robert Zubrin, Mars Society; Margarita Marinova, California Institute of Technology. Earth and Mars images: NASA

I think the exhibit was so well done because it had a clear and important message:

Humanity’s at a crossroads.

We’re facing deep decisions about how we relate to Earth and space.

What are we going to do?

All of this means that we’re expanding the context in which we think, imagine and act. So, what does herbal practice mean in the era when humanity is considering questions such as: should we plan to leave Earth? What does the evolution of our race mean on a cosmic time scale? Where are we going as a species?

These are huge questions, and they require thoughtful consideration. So, how are we as herbalists contributing to this conversation? I think we should. Our context is changing and humanity is going into uncharted waters. What’s the bigger picture of our work?

In pondering these questions, I keep coming back to connection as the nexus and grounding value I hold in my work. Connection to human and ecological communities. Connection to life itself. It’s a big curiosity of mine right now.

As people who love plants, life & community, what’s our contribution to the many crossroads we face? I think we have an important perspective to add. And a responsibility to do so.

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This day marks the darkest day of the year, with the Sun pulled back from the Northern hemisphere. To honor this day and the beginning of Winter, I’ve collected some works to share with you.

Read fantasy stories, poetry and folktales.

Light candles, make fires.

Make your home really beautiful. Fill it with music: Sequentia Ensemble: Iacobe Virginei. (And there’s more here.)

Tend to what you love.

Articulate your values and principles.

Make more decisions.

Build the fire within. Create your life and legacy from the inside out.

Eat berries, dig roots, hug friends, repeat. (from Ananda Wilson)

Honor conifer medicine: hemlock tea, spruce-maple brandy, fir oil or butter, salve with resins, wreaths & garlands.

Bless and thank your water: well, reservoir, nearby rivers & creeks, the rain.

Panos Tsigaris, The Second Mystery

See the dimensions in those in-between places: dawn & twilight, solstices & equinoxes. (Special things come into focus.)

And bring your magic into the world for us.

Be forever dead in Eurydice-more gladly arise
into the seamless life proclaimed in your song.
Here, in the realm of decline, among momentary days,
be the crystal cup that shattered even as it rang.

Be-and yet know the great void where all things begin,
the infinite source of your own most intense vibration,
so that, this once, you may give it your perfect assent.

To all that is used-up, and to all the muffled and dumb
creatures in the world’s full reserve, the unsayable sums,
joyfully add yourself, and cancel the count.

-Rainier Maria Rilke, The Sonnets to Orpheus, Book 2, XIII

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I then checked my email and received a flurry of freak-out emails from some of the global health foundations and nonprofits that I follow, alarming their audience to the devasting shortage of funds that are threatening crucial HIV prevention & treatment programs, tuberculosis programs & the like.

I don’t want to sound unsympathetic, but it’s happening everywhere. The economic calamity of the last 3 years has shaken social and health services to their core. In my community, so many more people are houseless, without medical care or any kind of safety net.

How we determine who should take care of who depends on how you define your people or your tribe. Who is our group? With whom do we share our identity? Think about it.

This issue of group identity has a cultural basis also. If we’re a part of a community that has a community identity, that’s likely to influence our notion of the groups that we’re a part of. So I think this issue of who should care for who is determined by where you are, and the nature of relationships there.

All that said, the social safety net that has been holding up many folks isn’t resilient. They aren’t able to withstand current economic trends. So, the responsibility (and burden) goes back to the community. But communities, by and large, have relinquished their leadership over the last century to state and federal leadership. But that tide is changing, and we community practitioners & advocates are at the forefront of it.

The Makah community, a tribal reservation on the Northwest peninsula of Washington state, is reclaiming their health services. In 2006, they took back control of health services from Indian Health Services, the federal bureaucracy that’s decimated Indian health. They’ve since instated a Makah Wellness Clinic, an integrative clinic that is specific for the Makah people and community. They’re identifying what health means for them, and are connecting community organizations to make these health services accessible to their people. I got to visit and meet with their team earlier this week and was greatly inspired by their dedication, persistent and heart. They’re going to do great things, those folks.

And we at the Olympia Free Herbal Clinic are identifying unmet needs in our community and answering them with no-questions-asked free consultation, herbal medicines and education. We teach at immigrant advocacy organizations, prisons, farms and schools. There are so many examples of rural and community clinic work, where practitioners are being responsible for the health of their place. Rosalee de la Foret has just launched her clinic in the Methow Valley. Kiva Rose practices in her village in Reserve, NM. Charles ‘Doc’ Garcia practices street herbalism in Richmond, CA. 7Song works at the Ithaca Free Clinic in Ithaca, NY. There are many more examples of this powerful work, and I’d like to know about it. Drop me a line, as I’d like to write something up on what’s happening, so if people want to get involved and help out they know where to find you.

Stands of wild Trillium ovatum. Plants like to be in community also.

It’s time for communities to become more resilient, to care and nurture the health of their people. For this, we need leaders and advocates for strong, resilient connection with people & habitat. With the fall of the national social safety net, our people now look to us for support.

It’s the age of the Rise of Community Leadership, and you’re at the forefront.

So what are you going to do?

No related posts.

Simone Martini, Annunciation (detail), 1333

It’s high time for us Northern hemisphere dwellers to gather the goods to keep us warm and cozy for the winter. These include good books, dried herbs we gathered over the growing season, and—very importantly—music.

There are few things more pleasurable than waking up on a cold morning, climbing into wool sweaters, making a fire and getting to work in the kitchen and apothecary. Though it may be ghastly outside, working with the plants I gathered and medicines I made connects me to the Sun behind the clouds and to the warmth in the ground. It helps to have candles, sweet smokes, scents & smells in the air and beautiful sounds infusing the space.

I’ve compiled my favorite medicine making, potion brewing, card-reading and golden thought-inspiring music to share with you all. The following tracks range from a few different genres—medieval, classical, witchy, Bulgarian choir, Transylvanian folk music (a hat tip to my family). It’s meant to touch that deep, ancient, celebratory and magical space in our hearts so our work & medicine is infused with timeless inspiration. I originally wanted to burn it on a CD and gift it to a few friends, but felt that you all might want to have a listen.

Feel free to download it, and if you like the artists, please buy their albums and support their work. My teacher Joyce Netishen would always end her letters with “Long Live the Magical Purpose,” and that’s my blessing to you for this Yule season.

Enjoy this as my gift to your apothecary, practice and life.

Here’s the download link. It’s hosted on Rapidshare. Just click ‘Free Download’ and it’ll save as a .zip files to your computer. Then just open the file and it should decompress, and you’ll have 19 tracks of glorious goodness for your ears and heart.

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In herbal practice, the water element shows up in a variety of ways. But one of the most important applications of Water is in teas and brews. This practice entails the interaction of all the elements: fire heating the water, water meeting the plant (Earth), infusion meeting the Air and warming the Heart. It’s elemental art at work.

There’s something so alluring about making beautiful teas & brews. The simplicity and tradition of the practice is so nurturing to the soul. It’s just about hot water and plants. Unlike other botanical preparations, my tea and brew-making activities are very informal and casual. I don’t like to fuss or worry about amount of this or that or exact times.

About Infusions

Lilac flowers. I love infusing in mason jars. I ended up making a syrup out of these.

This is what we think of the most when we refer to tea. You heat water to nearly boiling, pour it over leaves in a teapot (I actually just use a measuring cup most often), wait and strain. Please ditch the teabags. Use loose leaves, whole leaves if possible. I really detest cut and sifted leaves and stems, and collect and dry whole leaves as much as possible. There’s nothing like watching beautifully-dried leaves and flowers unfurling in the water. How much herb for tea? I go by hefty pinches: about a pinch a cup. Again, this is a no-fuss thing for me. I leave the teaspoon measure for baking. And I like to cover the tea while it’s steeping. I never time it. You just know when it’s done.

You can also do infusions with cold water. Just don’t heat the water and let the herbs infused overnight or in the fridge. This works well with demulcent/mucilaginous herbs like slippery elm, violet leaves, marshmallow. This really helps with the burning/irritating kind of gastrointestinal upset. When you’re tummy’s too hot and dry.

About Decoctions

All you need: herbs, water, vessel. This is eleuthro root, oatstraw & rose.

They’re what are commonly referred to as brews. I have a very special vessel for brewing–a Pyrex flameware teapot.It’s a 3-cup, covered stovetop pot that’s perfect for my purposes. Decoctions basically go like this: put herbs in pot (I use a good healthy pinch per ingredient), cover with ample amount of cold water, heat on high to boiling, down to simmer for at least 30 mins.

I always just eyeball the amounts.

Plant parts that are good to brew are roots, barks, seeds, dried berries–tougher materials that need more heat & time to extract. If I’m wanting a brew that has leaves, stems or flowers in it, I’ll add them in for the last 5 or so minutes of steeping. Ananda Wilson named that method an incoction. Great articulation. Brews are also good to do for mineral-rich herbs, like oatstraw, nettle, alfalfa and raspberry leaf. A long brew (several hours or overnight) really helps break down the cell walls of these plants to make the minerals more bioavailable. And syrup bases are made from extensive decoctions.

And I have to say–I really like using the crockpot for long brews. Yes, chai from scratch with your choice of medicinal herbs in it, brewing for an entire day is UNBEATABLE. In fact, I use the crockpot the most for brews than for any other purpose.

Some Thoughts on Praxis & The Water Element

Honor yourself, the water and the tea: use beautiful and quality materials. For instance, I prefer to use glass only for tea and brews. I brew with glass, stir with glass, drink from clear glass. It’s my preference, my way of connecting with the beauty of the materials and elements. I just happen to like glass over any other material (though cast iron and copper certainly have their places!). And honor your vessels and wares. My practice is to bless the tools in my medicine-making practice under the Full moon, as a way of honoring the elements. I also stir the waters in specific and intentional ways. That’s one example, you can do whatever you like. But I really encourage some kind of intentional, devotional practice. And always honor yourself by taking the time everyday to just enjoy a great cup of tea. It’s a practice of love, so practice loving yourself. Or heck, have friends over and share it with them too! Everybody loves tea time.

Also–use good, pure water. One thing I love about Olympia is our artesian well, which us residents regularly coagulate around to fill our jugs up with the best water we’ve ever tasted. Clean and pure water is so important, let’s bless it and be thankful for it.

To kick it up a little, here are some of my go-to favorites for teas & brews (and concoctions that lie somewhere in between those categories):

• Eleuthro root, rose petals, oatstraw
• Yerba maté & bee balm
• Fresh tulsi & rose
• White sage, peppermint, nettle seed
• Nettles, rosemary, ginkgo leaves
• Hawthorne flower, elderflower, linden flower
• Burdock root, dandelion root, chicory root & cinnamon
• Pedicularis chai
• Spruce (or any conifer tips)
• Fireweed & salmonberry leaves
• Wildcrafted pacific willow & meadowsweet (for the achey days)
• Hawthorne berry & rosehip chai
• Burdock root & usnea chai
• Any dark, earthy high-quality pu-erh. There’s just nothing like it. As well as a good Phoenix oolong. Camellia sinesis, the tea plant, is a plant that’s helped me tremendously over long bouts of illness this year. It’s a great plant for the mind.

Home-grown green tea.

Want to read more? Recently, New England herbalist Ananda Wilson did a great post on milk decoctions that I recommend you check out. And Brooklyn acupuncturist Karen Vaughn posted about mineral infusions and decoctions that helped me better understand how to extract minerals from my brews.

And, if you’re in Portland, please go have tea with my friend and tea monk Po Li at Heaven’s Tea, whose entire plant practice is serving high-vibration and pure teas. He’s devoted his life to practicing tea medicine.  And if you’re in Olympia, visit the best & most beautiful coffee teahouse in town, SIZIZIS.

Sizizis: the best ever.

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The Flavor Bible: The Essential Guide to Culinary Creativity by Karen Page and Andrew Dornenburg

So, naturally you’re going to be doing some amazing cooking this season. Right? Great. Well, it’s high time to challenge your skills and expand your working repetoire of flavor combinations, and the Flavor Bible comes to your aid. It’s a culinary reference of flavor combinations and affinities. So you can look up ‘tomato’ and see season and energy affinities, and then 3 columns of ingredients that pair well with it. So you can adapt, say, a basic tomato soup recipe and make it a coriander-rosemary tomato soup with asiago (to name one example). And for someone who loves to cook with wild foods and fresh garden herbs, this book is one I open and refer to a lot. A bit pricey, but it’s a staple text for you foodies.

Witchcraft Medicine: Healing Arts, Shamanic Practices and Forbidden Plants by Claudia Muller-Ebeling, Christian Ratsch and Wolf Dietr-Storl

I adore this book and recommend it for anyone interested in plant history and lore. It is extremely well researched and mainly discusses European plants and uses. It’s a must for the bookshelf and the mind. If you are interested in the history of people’s spiritual connections and history with plants, please do yourself a favor and have a read! It’s one of my favorites.

Complex Herbs, Complete Medicines: A Merger of Eclectic & Naturopathic Visions of Botanical Medicine by Francis Brinker

I saw this book a couple months ago on my friend Jonathan Treasure’s bookshelf. The title grabbed me, because I’m very interested in complex medicines for complex bodies as a concept. Jonathan said it was great, and I trust it because the man is a genius. So bought it I did, and I’m joyfully deepening my knowledge of the history of pharmacy and Eclectic medicine. It’s a good one for your bookshelf.

The Dragon and the Unicorn by A.A. Attanasio

Earlier this year, I got an upsetting medical diagnoses that required that I take some time and just chill. I didn’t chill as much as I needed to, so I’m doing another good bit of it now. But in setting the space for the restorative chilling, I sought a good fiction book to read. I love fantasy literature and had read Lord of the Rings, Mists of Avalon, His Dark Materials Trilogy, The Invisibles, Andrew Lang’s Fairy Books and basically everything Neil Gaiman every wrote. So I didn’t know where to go next. I asked a bunch of my friends and, no joke, nearly everybody brought up The Dragon and the Unicorn. So I got it, I can’t put it down, and I don’t want to return it to the friend I borrowed it from. It’s a gorgeously written retelling of the Arthurian legends, rich with supernatural drama and masterful with character development. It’s the perfect book for winter. If you haven’t read it, I guarantee you will love it as you cozy up for the dreamy solace of wintertime.

In the Bubble: Designing for a Complex World by John Thackara

John Thackara is a designer currently residing in France. I came across his work a little while ago in my research on contemporary healthcare innovation and found his blog posts on the subject to be exquisite. He’s an incredibly forward-thinking holistic designer. He gets it. Naturally, I wanted to read his book and got it in the mail yesterday. I’ve just started on it and love it. The first chapter is on lightness in design. I love that he’s starting with that–I feel very strongly about beauty, elegance and heavenly qualities in all design work (especially anything medical or health-related). If you’re interested in complexity and design, this is a good one.

Conservation Medicine: Ecological Health in Practice by A.A. Aguire et al. (Eds.)

I love this anthology. The venn diagram on the cover shows the relationship between environmental, animal and human health. Ecological medicine says these 3 are connected and interdependent, and this book is a series of essays elaborating on this. Also discussed is global ecological integrity and resilience, biodiversity and human health, the ecosystem approach to health, and the emergence of diseases that specifically emergence from habitat disruption (i.e. Lyme disease).

Invasive Plant Medicine: The Ecological Benefits and Healing Abilities of Invasives by Timothy Lee Scott

When this book came out last year, there was quite a bit of buzz about it. And it’s well deserved. This book–part herbal, part ecological theory, part field guide–is a very well researched and accessible. And there are plants covered that are really invasive and fall out of the scope of a lot of other books on uses for weeds and invasives, which typically cover things like dandelion and St. John’s wort but leave out scotch broom, Japanese knotweed, bindweed, English ivy, etc. A book for ecologists, herbalists and all plant lovers.

Healing Logics: Culture and Medicine in Modern Health Belief Systems by Erika Brady (Ed.)

I’m working on a article about local plant knowledge and human public health, and I’m currently reviewing the variety of conceptions and definitions of health worldwide. For those interested in medical anthropology and folk taxonomies of disease, have yourself a gander at this anthology. I got it for research purposes and I’m finding it incredibly enjoyable to read.

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1. Winter Reading List, Part Deux

What’s considered innovative is all tech-related: eHealth, mobile apps, medical technologies that hope to reduce cost on the patient’s end. What a snooze. Healthcare innovation ought to be rooted in holistic design principles that are based on serving people and communities. Technologies should be in service of other driving factors. Technology shouldn’t be an end in itself.

Tradition & Innovation

It occurs to me: traditions in medicine and innovation in medicine sit on opposite ends of a polarity we’ve created as a culture. We operate under a kind of cultural Darwinism: that we’re always weeding out practices that aren’t desirable. So by default, things that are associated with the ‘Past’–which includes all traditional and indigenous knowledge bases–are left out of the picture. What a waste. Things that are really revolutionary are taken for granted as a result.

The Challenging Yet Loving Nature of Paradox

Paradoxical and contradictory behavior is found in complex systems. We see it all the time: food relief efforts simultaneously bring food to people but also take it away (because they destabilize local food systems), economic recovery efforts that help some aspects of the economy and cripple others. That’s because complex systems (like communities, economies, biological organisms, etc.) have many layers of structure and behavior. They have multiple dimensions of behavior. Depending on our mental models of reality, we interpret their plurality of behavior as contradictory or paradoxical.

MC Escher

So paradoxes only exist because of how we frame and perceive reality. In this way they also point out ways to wholeness. Instead of thinking of tradition and innovation as a line, let’s connect the endpoints. Tradition IS Innovation. Let’s think about what that means for a minute. It opens a floodgate of possibilities.

This kind of reconciliation of seemingly dichotomous opposites can be applied to other areas. The polarity of Sickness and Health, for example, is something that a lot of people really struggle with. We identify as Sick, we want to get to Point B: Health. But what possibilities open up when we think of Sickness as Health? Maybe that opens up new learning for people’s experience with illness, and shows a new way out of a pattern.

So seeing Tradition as Innovation in health can open up some new and more sensible possibilities for how our society deals with health. It would allow us to move forward in a holistic and integral way. Here are some other polarities & paradoxes to toss around:

• Chaos | Order
• Simplicity | Complexity
• Natural | Artificial
• Joy | Suffering
• Good | Bad

And the list goes on. Identifying paradoxes we encounter can challenge us to see the wholeness in what seems at first to be a dichotomy. What paradoxes are existing in your life? And how can they serve your experience of wholeness?

Reality is whole and essentially nondual. Paradoxes present themselves to remind us of this fact. So as long as we live in a black and white way, we deny ourselves the experience of wholeness.

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Alan MacDonald "Daydream Believer"

It’s a cold, rainy Wednesday night here in the Pacific Northwest. When the rain returns, the whole mood of this terrain shifts. You feel the pull downward, the crystalizing and cleansing qualities of water rinsing everything. It’s a good time to take stock, and reevaluate. I’ve also been dealing with health challenges that have been begging me to slow down. (One of my best teachers, architect and whole systems designer Farouk Seif told us that “the faster you drive, the bigger the blind spot!”)

In this peaceful near-Winter contemplation, one thing that stands out is the amazing and loving work that’s taking place in the world. And I think of all the people whose heart’s work has reached mine, and it saddened me a little to recognize that I don’t thank people enough for what they give me.

I’ve been moved and inspired by the work of so many during my short time in this life: herbalists, theorists, teachers, designers, artists, community organizers, and people that follow many more diverse paths. Their work deserves gratitude, and I want to publicly acknowledge and thank them for what they’ve given me. So in the coming months I’ll be posting regularly about beautiful & loving work and the people that brought it to us. I want people to know that their work has had a direct impact on me, and has helped make my experience on this planet beautiful and awesome. The things that you do, that come from the heart, really do matter. But we live in a culture that generally doesn’t thank people enough, and this is my personal practice of honoring them.

I thank all of you who are doing good work, and beckon you to join me in celebration & gratitude.

-Renee

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