Cacomixtle: A Chimera’s Story of Transformation, Rebirth, and Becoming Whole

Part II

(if you missed Part I, you can read it here)

Bear Medicine, by Jesse Wolf Hardin

Elemental: A Remembering

“Tears have a purpose. They are what we carry of the ocean, and perhaps we must become the sea, give ourselves to it, if we are to be transformed.”
-Linda Hogan, Solar Storms

When I found my way to my wild canyon home nearly a decade ago, I felt wounded beyond repair. Exhausted from the weight of my pain, my body essentially shut down, and I spent years learning to work with the local plants to heal to the point where I could even digest food again.  Yet sick as I was, I felt secure for the first time in my life, safe from unwanted hands or the urge to medicate myself beyond self-recognition. And I slept soundly for the first time in over 12 years, as well, no longer waking in a silent start to protect myself from real or imagined threats. In the arms of newfound family, in the wild place my spirit craved, I found myself unpeeling the many layers of my masks, tentatively wondering if it might be safe to start showing bits of real self.

Then came the bear! During a several day and night long quest in the mountains, soon after my arrival in the canyon, I had an unnerving and vivid vision of a grizzly walking across the precipice in front of me, stopping, then turning to look at me before moving on. This is one part of the origin of my blog address/business name of Bear Medicine Herbals, and I came to know the bear as a role model and ally. Its fierceness gave me a previously unknown sense of feeling protected, while the bear’s affinity with the healing plants afforded me guidance.

Later, while working with my partner Wolf on our 5-element Anima Medicine Wheel, I began to understand the underlying elements and building blocks of how people’s bodies and personalities work, leading to the slow uncovering of my own most genuine, natural tendencies and character, revealing patterns so long buried beneath the artifice acquired for survival. I viewed myself as someone originating in the West, in the element of water, with insight, introspection, enigma, a need for story and propensity for solitude being emblematic of the West’s constitution. I realized I lacked the poise and confidence that often comes with that constitution, yet wrote it off as my being a damaged West person.

But as it turns out, West I am not.

Sacred Datura: Dreaming the Underworld

“Even if you’ve taken off every stitch of clothing, you still have your secrets, your history, your true name. It’s hard to be truly naked. You have to work hard at it. Just getting into a bath isn’t being naked, not really. It’s just showing skin.”
-Catherynne Valente

“The other side of the “sacred” is the sight of your beloved in the underworld, dripping with maggots.”
-Gary Snyder,  The Practice of the Wild

Bear Skull Botánica, by Jesse Wolf Hardin

This past Winter found me exhausted, dealing with one minor virus after another, my immune system trashed even while taking the proper amounts of Vitamin D, whole foods, adaptogens, and all the right herbs. A kidney infection provided a good reality check for just how tired my body, spirit, and mind really was. While I was able to clear up the infection with herbs and rest, they didn’t cure my wounds on deeper levels. I could feel that I was reaching a time of transition, but didn’t even have the energy to sort out all the changes I felt occurring within me. But even without specific attention devoted to the process, the shift kept showing up in my dreams in the shape of very specific images. In my dreams I was kneeling on fragrant needles beneath towering Ponderosa Pines, listening to the wind whip across the ridges above me. Just in front of me was an aged grizzly bear skull, sun-bleached until its lacy framework was beginning to show through. Through its empty eye sockets a Sacred Datura plant grew, its lavender and white blossoms in varying states of unfurling as dusk settled over the forest. Under the Datura, fruiting Fly Agaric mushrooms were fruiting in all their fierce red glory. I’ve long had a close relationship with Datura, considering it one of the more archetypal plants connected with death and rebirth. While teaching, I often call it “the phonograph of the underworld” with its trumpet-shaped flowers and propensity for evoking strong emotions and sensations in humans, even without ever ingesting it.

In my dreams, the Datura and Fly Agaric were surreally vivid, their colors glowing against the growing dark of the forest around me. They seemed to be illuminated from somewhere below the ground, and when I peered into an open Datura flower I found myself falling into a flaming void before waking up with my heart pounding and a profound sense of dislocation and urgency. The dream reoccured so often that I asked Wolf to draw it for me in order to somehow be able to get a grasp on imagery in the waking world. Even without much description on my part he managed to replicate it in nearly perfect detail. As soon as I had the drawing in my hands, the dreams disappeared.

It didn’t take a great deal of interpretation to understand that my dream was speaking to me of an imminent death and rebirth. I didn’t know exactly how that would manifest, but I definitely felt an insistent attraction to the plants and symbols that portend and midwife transformation through vision, dreams, and death. Like pulling the Death or the Tower card in a tarot reading, I didn’t exactly view this as a gift. I’ve experienced so many transitions and periods of falling apart in my life that I’ve learned to dread the often painful process. When, instead of everything going to shit around me, I began finding new creative outlets in the creation of sensual botanical perfumes and sacred incense made from local plants, I felt wary. Rebirth usually hurts, and I was enjoying everything enough that I had myself braced for the backlash I was sure would come. I found myself luxuriating in flowery bath salts and other “girly stuff” that I’ve never had much of an affinity for, and spending far more time than usual (which is already a LOT) sniffing and touching everything in the natural world that I found interesting or appealing.

Sacred Datura, Datura wrightii

The flip side is that while my already hypersensitive senses were in overdrive, my sensitivity to other people’s energy and presence was also heightened, and I found myself turning down new clients and any other optional encounters with humans. I knew this was in part due to the inner work I was doing, but also something more. It grew to excruciating levels, where I was in tears at the very thought of having to talk to a stranger, and my childhood shyness, so long subdued, had returned with a vengeance. I wanted to curl into a ball with my hands over my head every time I spoke to someone.

This heightened sense of fear had me questioning the most primary parts of my sense of self. I was unable to break out the shell I felt progressively more trapped within, isolated and alienated from my senses even as my senses were demanding recognition. Curled up in a ball on the cabin floor, crying to Wolf about my brokenness, I looked up at him and said “I’m not really who I think I am, am I?” As soon as I was able to just say it, I felt the shell crack around me, as if it had been waiting for just this one admission. In that moment, all my illusions about my identity shattered. Laughing through my tears, it was suddenly easy to look in the mirror and see the curious, feeling creature on the other side and recognize her as an expression of the element fire, someone childlike and playful, deeply caring, and still innocent in ways I’ve tried to hide for my entire life. I now saw myself with the eyes of a Ringtail, stripped of my guarded grizzly artifice, and my fractured self at last made whole… and home.

El Sagrado Corazón: My Heart on Fire

“in me all that fire is repeated,
in me nothing is extinguished or forgotten…”
-Pablo Neruda

Like many breakthroughs, mine didn’t come all at once, in a flash of intuitive brilliance, but arrived in bits and pieces, through the insight and support from Wolf, and from hard-won insights that finally built into a crescendo I couldn’t ignore. Sitting on the floor of our little cabin, all my walls crumbled in on me as I realized just how unlike myself I’ve been for a long, long time. How the masks that had once protected me had become a prison of my own skin, no longer allowing me to grow or shift.

Just as with my relationship to the land, it wasn’t comfort that brought about transformation, but the need to adapt combined with the necessary sense of safety. Snakes tend to become irritable during the molting of their skins, and this has certainly been true of me as well, choosing to step away from most interpersonal communication and public exposure while I dealt with the discomfort and sometimes frightening perspective shifts that accompany rebirth. My old skins dropping away, brittle husks shed in New Mexico’s wild Spring winds. Underneath my skin is still tender and pink with its new exposure to the elements. The bear revealing herself as my protective guardian all these years, rather than being a reflection of my own self.

Dropping the masks has resulted in other changes as well, I find myself dressing more and more in vibrant colors instead of the dark greens and blacks I’ve favored for so many years, suddenly able to opt for expression over camouflage now that I feel more safe in myself. My long-time love for Mexican and Southwest folk art, music, and food has bloomed anew, the burn of the chiles on my tongue, and the flicker of flames around la Virgen de Guadalupe’s sacred heart echoing my own return to fire, the coming home to my original nature and role as a medicine woman filled with the vital spark of life – and with the stories that illuminate even as they heal.

Kiva Ringtail Rose, by Jesse Wolf hardin

In this newfound core of self, I have also found the true value of my medicine, and my work as a healer. One cannot be a “powerful” Medicine Woman without dropping all the pretense and posturing, stripping back down to our original blessed selves, embracing our true natures, needs and dreams.  Then the role that we assume is no longer something we acquire, add or wear, but who we are.

I am finally learning that my vulnerability, my childish delight in all things up-close and small, my inborn belief in the magic of this world, dreaminess, and insatiable curiosity are all parts of my gift and medicine, rather than simply ways that can get me hurt, or excuses for masks and armor.  I still struggle with letting myself be seen for myself, in words or otherwise, and I expect this to be a process I move through for some time. It’s difficult to share this intimate transformation with so many through this blog, to not cry at the very thought of allowing anyone to read about the parts of me I’ve kept protected for so long.

I have to remind myself over and over that I no longer need to be a tiny sparrow who can disappear into the mountains, or the combative bear, I can be the wild ringtailed girl in the tree that I really am, watching the moon rise, listening to the plants bloom in the canyon’s beautiful dark.

“I hope, in years to come, I shall hold my heart up and it will be a pane of clear glass, through which I see all, but nothing is distorted.”
-Catherynne Valente, The Folded World

Introduction:

Most all of you have a sense of who Kiva is from her emotive and illustrative writings, her personality and perspectives… but she’s not always been all that she seems, nor all that she truly is and can be, and some of us recognized – even before she did – the precious vulnerability and resilient innocence alternately frolicking and hiding beneath her confident Bear-like posture.  From the time she was a hurt young child, she has been trying to both understand and heal her self through the process of writing.  In a way, she has been attempting for over two decades to write the following piece, in her most authentic voice, and now it is done.  And now she is able to be wholly and openly her true self for the very first time!  This two-part post calls upon us neither to pity her for any suffering, nor exalt her for her arduous recovery of her true nature, but to find in her example the inspiration to be as honest in our own self explorations, as courageous about embodying and sharing who we really are, and as determined to fulfill a role that makes use of all the crap and magic, hurt and healing to help others.
-Jesse Wolf Hardin

Cacomixtle:

A Chimera’s Story of Transformation, Rebirth, and Becoming Whole

by Kiva Rose (“Ringtail”!) Hardin

Part I

“I will tell you something about stories. They aren’t just entertainment. They are all we have to fight off illness and death. You don’t have anything if you don’t have stories.”
- Leslie Marmon Silko

In the quiet of late evening, the red spotted toads trill their mating songs by the river while the Poor-Wills pick up the chorus, and several species of Owls call down into the canyon from their treetop perches. Hooves can be heard clattering against the stones as Mule Deer make their way down from the mountains looking for sweeter grass under the waning moon. And in the canopy of Evergreen Oak growing from the canyon wall, a smaller creature may be seen running head-first down a tall tree trunk. On silent paws, she moves through the understory of Cholla cactus and Redroot with her large fox-like ears twitching, taking in the sounds of her home. Up the rock face she leaps, purposefully sniffing out favorite berries and the occasional scorpion for a snack on her way. Once to her favorite spot on the cliff, she spreads herself out on her belly, a long black and white banded tail waving behind her as she rests on the cool stone. With a single wild gooseberry between her white paws, she sings out to the night, plaintive barks interspersed with small chirps that could easily evoke a bird if you didn’t catch site of the little animal that lays on the cliff singing to the crescent moon. Even if you did catch a glimpse, you might still wonder just what she was – perhaps a desert chimera made up of fox, cat, coon, squirrel, and mink.

Desert Chimera: The Medicine of Wholeness

“The truth about the world, he said, is that anything is possible. Had you not seen it all from birth and thereby bled it of its strangeness it would appear to you for what it is… a medicine show, a fevered dream, a trance bepopulate with chimeras having neither analogue nor precedent…”
-Cormac McCarthy

Nestled high in the arms of a Juniper tree – its shreddy bark warm under my bare feet as I lean back against the branch, gazing out into the canyon’s brilliant azul sky through the blue-green foliage – I feel more at home than almost anywhere else. The red and black basalt of the steep arroyo glitter with inset quartz below me, and I can smell the butterscotch sweet scent of the Ponderosas Pines around me. Errant breezes bring the fragrance of the sacred sage, Estafiate, from the base of the mountains. The occasional blue-bellied lizard scurries past me on the branch, and chipmunks chide me from neighboring trees.

From here, I can watch the sinuous movement of the river in the canyon bottom, and a herd of Rocky Mountain Elk wanders down from the ridges to drink alongside a small band of White-Nosed Coatis that are nosing around near Prickly Pear growing from a stony outcrop. I continue watching them over my shoulder as I shimmy down the tree trunk and run the rock ledge to get a closer look at this gathering of critters by the water. Always, even at my most withdrawn and fearful, my curiosity has overwhelmed all my reservations to bring me closer to whatever holds my interest. While I would have denied it in favor of seeming more detached for many years, my foundational nature has always been defined by my curiosity and love of the close-up. I like nothing better than being a little girl in the top of the tree, examining the colorful lichens and tiny mushrooms growing from the bark.

I’ve known since I first arrived in the canyon that this place, in all its brilliant diversity and ancient beauty, was a huge part of myself and my identity that had been missing before I found my long way home. Arriving here, even with the difficulty and sometimes painful transformation it entailed for me, was a revelation of self-discovery. To realize so much of my spirit was tied to these red rocks, soft silver clay, and sharp-edged obsidian, was to finally see myself in the matrix, the context, I so needed to make any sense of myself.

Even now, when my work leaves me drained, confused, and sometimes hurt, I find my solace and source in the open arms of the land. Not everyone sees these Cholla spines and Lycium thorns as welcoming, but their fierceness and sharp edges have taught me how to better open to the intense and often challenging nature of this place. The opening has been slow for me, incremental steps toward my own tender inner self that I’ve spent most of my life trying to shut down and shut out in order to be less vulnerable. Shutting down in order to avoid being hurt by other people was in itself a questionable success, and also served to shut down my senses in many other ways, denying me intimacy with place, as well as people.

The canyon has a particular ability to wake me up, to poke at me gently until I pay attention. For nearly a decade, I’ve spent each day slowly becoming ever more myself, each dusky rose and blood orange colored sunset seeing me stripped just a little further down to the raw core at the center of me. Each layer lost changes the image in the mirror a little bit more, brings my face into slightly better focus. A more comfortable place would have likely allowed me to slip into a comfortable complacency instead of prodding me into continuous growth.

By the time I reach the water, scrambling over boulders and jumping down the small drop-off near the water, the elk have moved on and the Coatis have wandered further downriver in search of more insects and berries. I watch the Crawdads gliding below the surface of the water and lean over to get a closer look at a certain sparkly fish flitting in the current. And then I see my own face. I’m taken by surprise to see the laughing, child-like expression with wide, wondering eyes reflected back at me rather than the wary, contained woman I’ve been since my early teens. Instead of the swiping paw and intimidating largeness of the bear I’ve embraced for the last decade, I see the mischievous grin and small form of a Ringtail Cat.

As soon as I could admit this transformation to myself, Ringtails started showing up – literally – at my door. More than once on recent nights, we’ve heard the distinctly Ringtail barks and chatterings just outside the cabin. And one night while walking to the outdoor tub, a Ringtail ran along the roof of the water tank next to me, chittering until I shined the flashlight toward it to get a better look, which was greeted with indignant hissing until I shut the light back off. Then one of our resident helpers brought back a small skull from a walk that Wolf and I immediately recognized as a Ringtail with its Procyonid teeth pattern and distinct carnassial teeth, far more developed in a Ringtail than its Coati and Coon cousins, who are less carnivorous than the Ringtail. The skull still had bits of skin and hair clinging to it, and despite its somewhat gamey smell, I couldn’t help but hug it. While Ringtails have certainly been in the canyon all along, their sudden overt presence helped drive home this transition as I shift from self-protection to self-expression.

Nocturnal and shy, Ringtails are often mistaken for something else entirely during one of their rare sightings. With their black and white banded Raccoonish tails, fox-like faces, flexible bodies reminiscent of minks and cats, and sometimes multisyllabic  bird-like chirps, it’s no wonder folks can get confused by this elusive little tree-loving creature.  Ringtails have often been mistaken for other animals, and even named according to the confusion. Their Aztec-derived name, Cacomixtle, means “Half Mountain Lion” and their scientific name in Latin, Bassariscus astutus, can be translated to “cunning little fox” and even the common name, Ringtail Cat, infers another animal entirely. They’re also sometimes called Miner’s Cats  and California Minks, also adding to the general mystery surrounding their origins and nature. Ringtails actually belong to the Procyonidae, along with Raccoons, Kinkajous, Olingos, and Coatis, with the whole family being native to the Americas.

As the pieces of me come together into a whole, I am careful to be unfailingly conscious in the commitments I make and the roles I take on. To be as authentic as possible in how I present myself, the medicine I give, and the stories I tell. This tale is my own, itself a chimera created from what was once lost or broken, grown into the creature I am: storyteller, medicine woman, blazing fire.I’ve often felt similarly, frequently misnamed or misread by those around me, and even by myself, described as bits of pieces rather than any recognizable whole.  So many years of not recognizing who I really am have taught me the danger of wearing the mantle or mask of what I am not. While some illusions have purposes, to protect us when we’re vulnerable to help us move through a difficult situation, they also have a tendency to seep into our skin until we can no longer see where we end and they begin. Losing ourselves to any role, whether something as positive as being a caregiver or as blatantly negative as getting stuck in a victim stereotype, can not only limit us, but trap us behind walls of our own making or allowing.

Sparrow in Flight: The Fracturing

“There are parts of me he’ll never know, my wild horses and my river beds,
and in my throat, voices he’ll never hear.
He pulls at me like a cherry tree, and I can still move but I don’t speak about it.
Pretend I’m crazy, pretend I’m dead.
He’s too scared to hit me now – he’ll bring flowers instead”
-Heather Nova, Island

Many is the time as a kid, that I took refuge atop the red shingled roof of a three-story, abandoned house in Kansas City, watching the neighborhood below in the failing light, listening as playing children were called indoors. I felt safe there, squeezed between the gable and a tree branch growing against the house. I hugged myself with shaking arms, and told myself a story about a girl who could turn into a sparrow and fly away… above the city, and the dirty snake of the Missouri river, above the prairie and into the wild mountains far beyond where the tree spirits would teach her how to weave baskets from willow and gather food from the forest floor.

If there was one term used to describe me most frequently as a child, it was “oversensitive,” with “impatient” and “too curious” as close seconds. There’s no doubt I was thin-skinned and easily hurt, painfully aware of every vocal nuance and veiled look. This oversensitivity often translated into shyness, but not always, as I was more than once found dancing for strangers in the grocery store. Often enough though, it meant that I was fascinated by people and friendly until the moment I felt rejected or pressured, which was the point at which I would collapse into tears and hide under the nearest piece of furniture or up in a tree if possible. No doubt my propensity to take everything to heart endlessly frustrated those around me. It also allowed me to be broken by a world I didn’t understand, and by those who – wounded themselves – did so much harm to me instead of caring for me.

“Only do not forget, if I wake up crying
it’s only because in my dream I’m a lost child
hunting through the leaves of the night for your hands….”
-Pablo Neruda

It was clear early on, that I’d been born in a place and at a time where my innately dreamy and tender ways would cost me dearly. From the beginning, I saw how sensitivity could result  in you being hurt, and how dreaminess could get you labeled as lazy and useless, while incessant activity and ambitions were praised as admirable. A good mind was a useful mind, not like mine… filled to the brim with fairy stories and elaborate fantasy worlds, Pablo Neruda poetry and an endless recitation of fanciful flower names. I wanted to be a dancer, an artist, a poet who knew the language of animals and stones, a wild creature racing from one treetop to the next, a flame flickering with all of the passion of the living world.  And I wanted to really feel like I belonged someplace, but my dreams and desires all seemed impossible, festering in a radically conservative and terrifically dysfunctional family in the South, manipulated, controlled and physically abused by a bible spouting, paranoid preacher father, unprotected by a mother living in a constant state of delusion and denial. I don’t remember a second of feeling truly secure as a child, never felt safe being my real self or sharing my inner life, and I came to see my natural ways of being as an endangering weakness and serious liability.

My response to the combination of puritanical moralizing and immoral treatment, was to curl up tightly in a private place within myself. The only way I was able to release my pent up emotions through the vehicle of poetry, carefully crafting my poems in a coded language of symbols that only I could understand in order to protect my most vulnerable feelings from my parents’ prying eyes. I listened to forbidden secular musicians like Tori Amos, letting myself be carried away by the unrestrained emotionality. And I continued my childhood habit of sneaking out my bedroom window at night.

While these respites probably saved me in many ways, I was not whole. I was fractured.  I was not myself.

Mask of Roots and Water: A Confession

“Deeply I go down into myself. My god is dark and like a webbing made of a hundred roots that drink in silence.”
-Rainer Maria Rilke

By 17,  I’d escaped my family but was homeless and exposed.  Instead of the red roof of my childhood, I hid out high in trees of the city park instead, my face pressing against the rough bark, taking comfort in the arboreal company as well as in the fact that I was ensconced in the one place that neither the thugs nor the cops would think to look for me! Even with my purple hair and typical all-in-black goth getup, I felt camouflaged enough there to relax, to run my fingers over the self-inflicted wounds that lined my forearms, to breathe slowly and deeply instead of my usual panicked gulps.

Living on the streets, experiencing repeated rapes, ridicule, humiliation, and the kind of captivity no living creature should ever suffer, I felt like a living embodiment of an open wound, barely able to contain the infection of pain and fear that welled beneath my skin. Yet I would survive, even if it meant that I had to deny my born nature, wear a mask of toughness and worldliness and grow a hard veneer around me. I learned to talk fast and hard, to stare down men seeking to intimidate me with a convincing enough fury to back most of them down. To swagger with enough false confidence to keep the women from picking on me. To wear long-sleeved shirts so as not to show the bruises, the cutting, the burn marks. To wear enough makeup that finally all the tear tracks were covered.

The poetry I wrote at that time was rife with imagery of broken glass, an endless torrent of blood and the search for a way through – if not out of – the tangle that my life had become. Woven within were the strands of myth and story I told myself over and over again:

Breathe into me

stir the ashes

and raise me up

Lazarus with

Magdalena’s face

I am the Phoenix, a raging

and winged thing

wearing a necklace

of the white skulls

of my murdered child

of all my lovers long dead

of heroin, alcohol, and despair

Losing friends to drugs, suicide, and gang shootings shut me ever more surely into myself. I spent my days cranked on uppers and my evenings in a whiskey bottle, medicating my feelings into brittle submission. The amphetamines made my temper short and my fear less. I had enough energy and could work hard enough that no one would ever call me lazy or dreamy or spacey again. Complete emotional withdrawal followed my being pushed face first down a flight of icy steps and the violent miscarriage that resulted. I told myself I could survive anything, that no man could break me, that I would be okay, if I could just build the walls thick enough, make my facade convincing enough.

“So my steps were slow and my swagger deliberate

And if ever my heart grieved now my body must not confess it

No, she will not fail me, for she expresses the very line –

I’m steady on, eyes dead set on – my hips move left to right”

-Rykarda Parasol, Night on Red River

The masks I hid behind were made to show the world the story of a woman secure in her body and self, spelled against the disease of anorexia, anxiety, and self-hatred that ate at me just beneath the surface. Most of all, I crafted them so as to keep the sensitive little girl both hidden and protected. I figured what I needed least in my life was vulnerability, another way to be hurt, another avenue through which to be betrayed. I was adept at making my masks convincing, playing the jaded sex worker and cynical woman-child well enough to make money at it. I wore these disguises, these  prosthetic personalities so often and so deeply, that they affixed to my being and began to grow of their own accord.

Solace, I found only in nature and in the fairy tales I’d clung to since early childhood. I liked to read about the street kids and abuse victims in Charles de Lint’s stories and the ways they stumbled into magic and beauty, and I held the hope in my heart that I could be one of those characters that could turn trauma into powerful art, or at least a wondrously haunting song. I clung to the idea that maybe there was something beautiful and magical in me, too. Such a tiny tendril of story kept me searching through the years for a wild place, for a home, and for a sense of self beyond victimhood.

Part II will be posted later this week.

“I want to stand as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all the kinds of things you can’t see from the center.” – Kurt Vonnegut

Herbalist. The term can make the role we fill sound as if it’s a single job rather than the multitude of overlapping and intersecting skills that it actually is. Gardener, Wildcrafter, Clinician, Medicine Maker, Field Botanist, Educator, Counselor, Activist, Accountant, Grant Writer and Advocate are just a few of the most common roles many herbalists find themselves filling. We will often find that our work is most powerful and authentic in the borderlands where these roles meet and overlap. To be an herbalist, especially in this era and place, is to walk the edge.

The word edgy is so overused as to be a cliche unto itself. And yet, that’s exactly what this work is. It’s learning the language of traditional medicine and conventional medicine and trying to speak it in an understandable way to people who may understand neither or have a distinct prejudice against either or both. It’s teaching gutter punks and retired RNs physiology from a new perspective and opening their eyes to the complex array of plant life that surrounds us at all times. It’s making old-fashioned medicine from common weeds and then attempting to understand how that medicine might interact with newly introduced pharmaceuticals or affect organ systems that scientists are just beginning to understand the function of.

Some would have us think that herbalism remains the domain only of “primitive” peoples or, on the other hand, conventional medical professionals who have the accreditation considered necessary to treat clients. And so we walk another kind of edge, within the legal system and the regulations created by entities such as the FDA.

These edges are important, imperative even. This is a time of many people being both disempowered and disconnected from even the most basic healthcare, often from a lack of education and finances. As herbalists, we’re pushing at the borders of what’s considered normal, sensible, and sometimes even acceptable, within mainstream society. Regardless of how straight we look, speak or feel, the very act of teaching or treating with botanical medicine tends to immediately place us on the fringes of standard American culture.

Within my practice, teaching, organizing, editing and writing I constantly strive to further acknowledge and embrace these edges and borders. To walk them consciously and with intent. Plant Healer Magazine and TWHC have been a furthering of that boundary pushing and edge walking. Wolf and I are in constant discussion and reassessment of that this means and how we can be most effective.

This is not easy work, especially when we live a culture that asks us to separate ourselves into pieces. That suggests we have different social media accounts for each and every one of our personal and professional roles for our many fragments, and the masks they each wear. That tries to insist that we splinter ourselves into cliches and titles and aliases until even we can’t remember which part of us is talking and what’s safe to say. But don’t worry, there’s a social media app for that.

My big mouth, constant questioning of the status quo and sometimes unpopular opinions have earned me more than a few disparaging comments both locally and in the larger herbal community. I admit that it’s sometimes tempting to shut up and play it a bit safer. To keep my opinions neutral. To make every response politic to the expected audience.

But really, fuck that.

For me, herbalism always has been about and continues to be primarily about the plants. Their beauty and inherent value as living parts of a larger organism we call Earth. The miracle of how even being near them in their chosen habitat is healing in and of itself. The myriad ways we interact with and rely on them. The magic, yes magic, of their bodies as medicine for our bodies. Only when all of these layers are present and integrated do I feel whole and happy with my work, my life, my self.

Occasionally I have to remind myself that my work with clients isn’t as a doctor, dictator or a magician, but simply as a matchmaker between person and plants. It’s that simple, and that difficult. There are other sorts of herbalists of course, and this description of my approach isn’t meant to be a definition of what you or anyone else does or needs to do. It’s here as remembrance that there are many ways to work in the diverse and dynamic field of herbalism.

As the snow clouds hang low over the canyon and surrounding mountains I realize that I’ve never before looked on the long, cold months of Winter with such anticipation. After more than two years of frenzied activity of putting together the TWH conference, Plant Healer Magazine and various teaching projects along with still seeing clients and trying to keep up with wildcrafting and medicine making, I realize I’m more than ready for some time turned inward.

It’s been easy to lose myself in the work of organizing and managing, to be subsumed by the large personalities I spend so much time promoting and working with. To forget the strands of my mission that are rooted in the Appalachian culture I come from and the New Mexico mountains that are my home. To find myself too exhausted at the end of any given day to nourish myself. To remember how to integrate all of the skills and roles into a functional whole.

While the deadlines and effort required for my work are undeniably endless, I’m creating new ways to reprioritize my time and energy. As the last copper-tinted leaves are blown from the Cottonwood trees, I find myself returning to the projects that keep me most in touch with what I care about, and what I most love about herbalism. I notice that I’m more frequently wandering into the kitchen to muse over my favorite Siberian inspired elk pelmeni recipe or breathe in the warm citrus scent of White Fir tea simmering on the woodstove. The mornings have more often been spent on a lichen clad boulder staring through the long threads of Usnea out at the Ponderosas bending with the winds and the river rippling sinuously between its banks.

As a result, I’ll be blogging more often, and my posts will return to their previously personal and wide topic range. You’ll also notice I’ve updated my blog header and am in process of updating the overall feel of the site and my writing. While it sometimes seems easier to restrict the subject matter on the Medicine Woman’s Roots to being strictly related to botanical medicine, I’ve found that this negates the original purpose and even the title of the blog. I don’t want a fracturing of myself into personal and professional personas. My vocation is a huge part of who I am and it’s more than a job, it’s my passion and a lasting love.

And if I ramble on about the color of Monkeyflowers and rant about the pseudoscience that passes for medical research and eat with my hands in public and climb trees in high heels and swear with great enthusiasm, well… you were forewarned.

Expect tales and monographs, case studies and rants, pictures and ramblings.

Expect to find yourself up against the edge, gazing out over where the vast diversity of traditions, medicine, cultures, plants and peoples come together.

Spring in the Country of Lichen & Spines: Fragments of Home

by Kiva Rose

~~~~

Warm temperatures have arrived early in my corner of the Gila, with the Golden Smoke blooming sooner this year than I’ve ever previously seen. This follows a cold (-35F is plenty cold for me, thank you) and dry Winter. Now our seasonal winds blow the sand up in spiraling circles until it dances like the shifting forms of whirling dervishes against New Mexico’s lapis colored sky. The skeletal limbs of shattered Russian Thistles caught up in these little whirlwinds give sharp edges to the dancers.

Golden Smoke (Corydalis aurea)

~~~~

The Canyon trees bend in the same wild winds and yet last year’s withered purple Juniper berries cling to their branches as they’re tossed about in the breeze. They retain their pungent yet sweet flavor as well, a little drier perhaps, but still strong with the distinct magic that comes only with being the fruit of a Red Cedar tree.

One Seeded Juniper (Juniperus monosperma)

~~~~

Even in drought these mountains remain a country fraught with magic. If anything, the enchantment is turned up enough in these extreme conditions. Walking among the apricot and lavender colored volcanic rock I often find myself with a sense of the surreal, or more accurately, the hyperreal. The contrast of the barbed tips of white and black cactus spines draped in swaths of green Usnea fallen from the limbs of tall Pines is in itself strange enough to be disorienting at times. The sharp wrapped up in the soft, the colors blending and emerging as something altogether new.

~~~~

Mountain Candytuft is our first showy flower each and every year since I’ve come to the Canyon. It’s purplish leaves and violet to white flowers dot the mountainsides and draw the first butterflies. A member of the Brassicaceae, the spicy-sweet taste of its flowerheads is reminiscent of a more flavorful broccoli and I’m always so excited to add it to my Spring soups and salads.

Mountain Candytuft (Noccaea fendleri subsp. glauca)

Mountain Candytuft (Noccaea fendleri subsp. glauca)

~~~~

The Cane Cholla is blushed a vivid pink from the cold temperatures but will return to its usual green color before producing flowers in a month or so. Clambering up and down the arroyos and dry creekbed, I peek under likely boulders looking for a few fronds of green and rust colored ferns and run my fingers along the ragged margins of the many-colored lichens that grow from almost every stone surface here.

Cane Cholla (Cylindropuntia spinosior)

~~~~

The New Mexico Olive has just begun blooming and it’s golden spray of flowers will eventually give way to the bittersweet blue-purple fruits that Loba and I will harvest and brine and use as tiny but flavorful olives in our meals. When I stopped on my way home to photograph the flowers a spring-mad hare leapt from the brush and went galloping off in typical jackrabbit fashion, too quick for me to even snap a picture.

New Mexico Olive (Forestiera pubescens) in flower.

~~~~

Moonwort emerges from dust and sand, its silvery leaves streaking the landscape with a tenacious grace and filling the air with the warm sagey fragrance so peculiar to the West. The sweet butterscotch scent of Ponderosa resin mingles with the Moonwort and makes the canyon air at once heady and sensual. Crouching down in the leaf litter as I gather the Moonwort leaves and chunks of pine resin to infuse into warm oil, I press my face against the puzzle piece bark of a Ponderosa and breathe in the medicine of place. I sit back on my heels to absorb the whiplash power of something so simple, so fragile as awareness of this unbroken moment where I remember that this is what I’ve always wanted – all my stories and songs unraveling in the face of amber-skinned trees and downy bitter leaves. Sometimes the beauty of life just can’t be comprehended as anything rational, my body (including my brain) just have to experience it as this tactile, skin-shivering beast that it is. Fuck analysis for a moment, just drink it up.

Moonwort (Artemisia carruthii)

~~~~

Arizona Sycamores raise their tangle of bone-white branches to the sun and drink in the cold water that curls down the mountains to pool around their roots. The first hummingbirds beat the air with a breakneck rhythm that well suits their warrior ways yet also belies the expectations sometimes created by their seemingly delicate beauty. Like the land itself, what appears fragile at first glance may be reinforced with a deeper strength.

On the Catwalk, near Glenwood, NM

Femail Broad-Tailed Hummingbird (Selasphorus platycercus)

~~~~

My home is a fierce place, fragrant with the scent of aromatic plants well adapted to aridity, populated with the varied songs of the myriad birds that take refuge in the trees and long grasses and sparkling with the glint of the Southwest sun on a thousand volcanic rocks forming these cliffs and arroyos. The Canyon is wild with the tracks of mountain lions and coatimundi, the soundless rush of opening flowers and the singing winds that circle and play among the emerging leaves.

~~~~

In the river, blue mica glimmers among the sand as the fish gather and part, gather and part with the tidal impulse of all things that love water. Spring in the country of lichen and spines feels warm under my bare feet this evening, and I dance to its strange, liquid music.

Bluestem Willow (Salix irrorata) staminate catkins

All Photos ©2011 Kiva Rose

It’s been a good long time since I’ve posted any of my poetry here on The Medicine Woman’s Roots, but the cold season and call to turn inward always brings storytelling of all kinds to the forefront of my mind. I wrote this particular poem last Winter when I began to feel my annual sadness brought on by the lack of green things nearby. Every year I find that I must consciously remind myself to let go a little of the need to grow and go and clamber and instead to allow myself to fall back into a slower and dreamier state. To walk outside among last season’s frost-touched flowers and let the beauty of a different, quieter season seep into me. As the last of the frogsong fades and the mountains slip into the sleepy months to come,  I give you this token of the dreamtime and a reminder to share story and song and silence in the darkness of the cold moons.

The Storytelling Moon

tell me a story, love
in the dark down
in this leaf lined log
where we lay together
and dream
root tendrils

into blooming
dressed in fur
your hair wild
and twisted with braids
and dried flowers
you touch my cheek
we curl together
stalking lunar circles
tracing sun spirals
on each other’s skin

the clacking
of small bones
between us
the stories we tell
of green buds
adorning brown sticks
of warm sweet honey
sticky on our lips

in the dark our tree
buried by
a thousand sparkles
by so many feet
of snow we speak
of swimming
to the cold surface
just to taste sunlight

but I breathe your scent
curl against your chest
arrange our blanket of moss
and brown leaves
turn with the moon
drink stars
and go deeper into darkness

———

Photo (c) 2010 Jesse Wolf Hardin

As much as I love all local foods, there’s something truly special about wild, totally uncultivated food growing right at my feet, and in the case of the Wild Grapes, dangling right above my head. There’s a vitality to be had in wild river-grown Watercress that the best cultivated varieties can’t even compete with. The sharp bite of Mustard, the sweet crunch of Wild Lima flowers and the fine flavor of fresh Cottontail brings me back to my body, and closer to this particular stretch of enlivened land.

Late afternoon often finds me waiting out the heat down by the river. After floating on my back down the cool current I usually gather greens for dinner in the shade of the Cottonwoods and Alders. Come summer, I’ll be able to curl up in the shadow of Red Currants, Gooseberries and Wild Mulberry trees to gather the juicy, tart fruits at my leisure.

Foraging draws me into the woods, gets me up close and personal with my source of energy, with my personal connection to vitality and life. In the eye of the deer in the heat of the hunt, or in the spiny folds of the Cholla bud, I see the gifting cycle spinning full circle. To eat and be eaten, to live and to die, only to become yet more life.

These plants and animals here are tough and willful. While the mountains of the Gila are usually fertile and rich in diversity, they’re also dry and nearly barren for months at a time. The strongly cyclical nature of the Southwestern seasons makes for especially resilient and insistent creatures. Every life I take, every morsel I eat, I honor it with prayers and a deep respect for its primal desire to live. Whether animal or plant, I give thanks for the magic that grew it, the breath that animated it, the land that sustained it. This is the sacrament of the ordinary, of the exrtra-ordinary, of the daily transformation of food to flesh, life to life.

Connection to what is wild spirals me deeper into my own wildness. The thorns and hard edges inspire me to grow stronger. The soft underbelly of the running Elk and the sensual curves of the Rose open me up to my own vulnerable side. We are what eat: physically, energetically, completely.

May what we eat always be beautiful, wild and full of the vital mystery of life.

~~~~~~~

~~~~

~~

I also just did an essay vignette on immersion in the natural world over at the Anima blog, you herb blog readers will likely enjoy it as well, so go on over there and check it out.

some mornings
I lay my face
against
the canyon walls
and listen to the hum
of the river current

while trees tower
along the arroyo
flush with flowering
white petals littering
the path up stone
and earth crevice

and I climb fingers first
into every cool cave
searching for the green
vine of life
as it curls
into fine cracks
uncoiling from pools
dark beneath
the surface world

water seeping
out of arid mountains
moist veins to feed
the delicate embroidery
of green life
to unfold the ivory mouth
of yucca flowers –
desert lilies
that taste
of bitter silk
cold and smooth
on parched lips

life beneath the surface
is a song
that has flowed into me
liquid and silver
as dawn
on the river
as stone
erupting into quartz
as lupine
drinking dew
the flowers
all falling down
on my hair

I press
my hands
against
canyon walls
and feel
the river run

in the spring
green shoots curl
around my toes
and the wind
sings into my veins

wild twist of blue
this river winds
through the root fingers
of willow and wild rose

down by the water
brambles hold me fast
cling to my skirts
and hush my whispers

blood from thorns
sweet like flowers
eaten from their stems
wild as the river shaking
the banks loose
of last season’s skin

the floods of winter
have brought me treasures
of seeds and stickers
weathered roots and red stones
that mark the place the sun stood
as I danced myself free
of the darkest days

in the daytime sky
the moon grows fat
and rolls across the hills
I watch her in the mirror
of this water
rippling and turning
as the first flowers open

as the green shoots unfurl
and red dirt drinks me in

For the Blog Party hosted by Ananda of Plant Journeys: Plant Myths and Archetypes

One of the ways I first came to herbalism was through stories, and especially fairy tales. The many volumes of such stories I owned as a child were read so often that eventually most of them completely fell apart, their spines broken, pages creased and worn cover beginning to crumble. Many of these tales did not present the plants and trees as benign, friendly assistants but as powerful entities capable of both generosity and what could sometimes be considered cruelty. I still remember of some of the horrifying images from a few of the oldest stories, of corpses hanging on Briar thorns, babies tortured to screaming by a cradle made of Elder wood and of ancient forests obscuring a young girl’s safe passage back to her village.

In other, or even the same, books, the plants cured blindness, provided shelter and food, or created transformational magic. Sometimes the plants were metaphors or representations of goddesses, monsters or giants. Whatever perspective the narrative took, it was clear that the plants, and especially medicinal plants were complex, varied with a life and language that is the root of our own. The European forest, still a powerful living force when these stories were first birthed, represented a complex organism that permeated human consciousness and had to be dealt with by rural people and travelers, and touched even those tucked safely away in walled cities and cozy agricultural towns.

These days, children’s books and movies tend to show cheerful woodland scenes with singing animals and helpful flowers. This is an easier approach to take now that many of the great archetypal forests of the world have become but mere shadows of their previous selves, and some have disappeared altogether. We’ve reduced our understanding of these places to whitewashed animation and culturally censored fables. Yet, there’s a special power to old growth areas, a palpable presence of the spirit of the place that is far fainter in fourth growth woodlands, mined mountains, plains stripped of their great migrating herds and whole continents deprived of their predators. This isn’t to say that there’s not magic in every area where the natural world is still present and pulsing up through sidewalks, burned out wastelands, clearcut strips and oil slicked beaches. These places are still important, beautiful and capable of healing. In fact, I feel that wounded land holds special gifts for us humans, we who are so often wounded ourselves. Yet no matter how lovely they may appear or how quickly they grow, they lack the intensity and complexity of the vital force that is present in places where the ecosystem has been allowed to grow, spread and bloom without radical interference for millenia.

The heart of the forest has long held special significance for humans as a magical place that few human ever have the courage or skills to navigate. From the lyrical tales of Tolkien to the enchanted forests of Miyazaki’s movies, we find remnants of this powerful place that still holds a profound sentience, and also the great mystery once so central to the human experience. This is the place at the very center of oldest trees, a place where it is still easy, even unavoidable, to feel and hear the forceful personalities of some of the world’s most ancient beings. How many of us have been there? More importantly, how many of our children have wandered with us through the primal wildness of a place unaltered by development, chainsaws and roads. Not just unaltered for the last fifty years, but for the last five thousand years? Will our little ones grow up to know, recognize and honor the power of these special places?

For most of us, experiencing these places will require conscious action, a pilgrimage of sorts. This is an effort, but it is only through personal relationship with these places that we will remember their importance, their magic and the necessity of preserving them, both for our benefit as living parts of the land and for the diversity of other life that depends on their existence. No matter how far we retreat into concrete, insulated particle board and reinforced steel, we are still a part of the ancient wild places, connected at the roots and bound by the very breath we breathe. The Heart of the forest is our own.
~~~~~~~~~~~

The First Forest

Carry the knife
Carry the dress
Between your teeth
Crawl through
This cold water
Knowing that
You may never
Reach
The other side

This is the myth
This is the story
No one tells
I am the girl
Who will kiss
Your mouth
And be gone
Back to never
Never land
Not so long
Before dawn

Peel this calico skin
Can you see who I am
Can you taste
My body
Taste the sweet
Bite of tree sap
And the tang
Of running blood

I’ll take you back
To the trees
To the first forest
The myth held
Inside stone
Water
and the liquid
States
of the human
Spirit

Whisper then
Walk closer
to every edge
Follow
the spiral
Down to earth
to the mystery
of water
Rising to cover
Everything
You have
Ever known

Listen to me
Let me
Bring you back
to the first
Human home
the original
Wood still
Splintered
with stone
that rises
from the earth

Heaving
with the
Ache of fire
the birth
of myth
and landscape
the human
Hands spiraling
Stone and water

Touch me
Until I turn away
Leaving
Only a mound
of leaf mould
and a million
Flowers still
Smelling
of honey
and the
Sweet scent
of new decay

Hold these
Handfuls
of scarlet
Petals and
Twining
Vines
Give my
Body to
the sky

Remember
the stories
Remember
that all these
Faery tales
are true

Fear of Fire

in flannel skirts and bare feet
I sit among the rare mosses
of a dry land
sweet beds of solace
in a place ghosted by flame
every pine needle a match
every cloud a pillar of smoke

even in winter
I watch for lightning
the one strike, the one tree
that will become a torch

in my dreams, everything smells like smoke
and singed skin

I bury my body in the in the river
and let the cold throb
wash the fire out of me
I let myself remember the liquid song
of my blood

I forget about fire
just long enough
to breathe

—————————

Fire Season

the fingers of the pines are turning brown
each summer a little crisper, the fires a little bigger
in the village, people fan themselves
and look warily at the sky
for lightning or smoke
back then, they say,
we knew how winter was going to be
the forests didn’t burn so hot
the earth told us her name
and the aquecias ran full

up in the Pecos
the pines are naked, bitten
dead or dying
barren as a battlefield
every mountain a memorial
though we give no names to our dead
only mutters of pine beetle and damn drought
and fire season
fire season, that every year
stretches longer

down here, we’re still waiting,
shifting from foot to foot
as we have another monsoon
big enough to get us through
just big enough for the grasses to grow tall
and then dry to kindling in the autumn winds

in the north
fire is what keeps you warm
cures frostbite and cooks food
here it is the telltale ribbon
at the edge of the woods
that sings a death song
for wildflowers and rivers

these fires are hot as hell
no manzanita and fireweed
will spring from the charred ground
no resurrection after three days of sleep
only charcoal, ashes and cracked rock
and the absent rains that refuse to wash them clean

Wet yellow flowers
woven into watercress
the ground cool
and damp enough
that puddles form
around my bare feet
gold petals slick with sundots
late season survivors
of a quick coming winter

on this island of lush life
I linger among the red skinned dogwood
and let the sun warm my cold toes
watching the light turn to gold
as it passes over willows
and the wild hills of the Gila

gathering up summer in my hands
I eat monkeyflowers and watercress
tasting all the spice
and sweetness of heat
as the ice forms along the river

In the night
Purple asters
Curl inside themselves
Give death to autumn

And I
Stand beside the river
Let leaves
Slide from the sky
To shiver against my skin

October falls asleep
Her mute mouth
Pressed against
Roots and dust
She dreams the dark
Beds of elk mothers
Among willow and
Barren alder

She dreams
The wind as it pulls
At yellowing mistletoe
And the red brambles
Of my hair

Among the nettles
She dreams a green birth
Under a blessed snow
The rocks are red
Wet with icy rain
Slick as a beating heart
Laid bare
In the hunt

The hollow click
Of empty chambers
Troubles the sleep
Of a she-bear
Blanketed in red leaves
Roots and a slow rain

Gunshots echo
From ridges
Rife with tired men
The elk mother
Leaps on unshaking legs
She clears barbed wire
Leaves clumsy hunters
Fumbling in their own fences
Far behind

October smiles
And turns over
In her bed
Of dust, wood-smoke
And darkening sky