The September new moon passed with the making of our annual autumn polypharmacy oxymel. I love the polypharmacy approach of blending multiple medicines together into one remedy. This jar captures a unique medicinal moment in time on the land & so many herbal actions including nervines, circulatories, anti-microbials, hepatics, anti-inflammatories & more to be taken as a tonic for the winter months ahead.
Making an oxymel (which is made with equal parts honey & apple cider vinegar) is a wonderful way of celebrating the ambiguity of moments ‘in between’. The ambiguity of these seasonal thresholds is my absolute favourite place to be; where richness, diversity & nuance dwell. At the shift in the seasons, we are in the midst of transition where change & transformation come fast.
The making of medicine since the bone dry reality of drought comes with an awareness of the fragility of the garden as I know it. With climate change upon us & the war at large still raging over our earth mother, the work now is to adapt to what comes ~ as fast as it comes.
I wrote my heart out over the equinox. These words I share with you below are what feels very alive for me as someone tending land through these changing times.
Remedies made from a changing land, in changing times; one way to harvest the resilience we’ll need.
Such markers of change in the year as the equinox are an opportunity to slow to a pause. Calling us back to embodied conversation with land. To open ourselves to the forgotten languages of the wild ones all around; those still connected to the web of life.
In land time we rest in the relief that we matter less for a while; that the human self dissolves away & we may re-enter the web just long enough to glimpse the memory of it.
What sweet medicine for the times. In the making of medicine from this place of presence, the land welcomes us home.
This is the way we walk back towards our great land mother. Over time land becomes more than something we work or learn or use; she becomes stitched & pressed into our very being. Land claims us. Something in us belongs to her.
Through looming crisis, new paths will be made by the manner of our walking.
I take my apprenticeship in change to this precious time spent upon changing land. The land knows change. The call to change comes as fast as the climate changes. Fast now. As wild ones adapt to climate change, we too must educate ourselves in the art of change.