GOOD GRIEF: Plants for Tender Times
January 2025
I walk down the path of one of my most beloved trails. I have not been here since the golden embers of late summer set their hues on the dense forest floors. Salal was ripe then, and the blackberries would have been sun-warmed and plump for the picking if the county had not sprayed them that year. What a pity.
I greet the great Cedar who stands at the top of the path and walk on during this rare sunny day in January. The air is crisp and quiet, my footsteps out of place among creatures who know how to stay quiet and hidden if they so desire - the white tail deer, the wood peckers, the robins.
This trail enchants me all through the year, but especially so during this clear quiet of winter. Thanks to may plants taking a rest - thimbleberry, salmon berry, blackberry, cow parsnip, nettle - the forest floor appears rather bare, save the fallen maple and cottonwood leaves and branches and the green, erect sword ferns. Over the hummus I walk deep into the wood with more ease, seemingly less to trample. An otherworld clarity makes itself available to me when standing high on the ridge, otherworldly yet very much of this world, the winter world, the quiet world - a clarity I have often heard folks refer to when speaking of winter time, of January, as if in a metaphor. It is no metaphor, though. There is clarity here. Things have died and will live again. In me, in this forest, in the world at large that thinks itself so far removed from these rhythms. It is not.
The dying and the getting clear often feels like an ecstatically uncomfortable yet nostalgically familiar process. It often shows it face through grief.
A dear friend recently said “Part of grieving is letting go. That is what differentiates it from sadness.” Of course this walks across my heart just as the full moon in cancer, which passed now more than one week ago at the time of this writing, brought many of us, myself included, to our knees in grief. And for those who struggle to surrender to the divine, to “assume the position” as one of my teachers once spoke of prayer and grief, the moon's tides turned up a certain flavor of cancerian intensity. A pervasive gravity swept over many of us, and I am always thankful for the plants that help me process these times and engage them to continue my ever important work of becoming a more alive, more whole, more intact human.
Salix spp.
Willow, her lancet leaves absent from the branches during these dark winter months. I sit beneath her branches by the river and feel an upwell of emotion that was not there before. I try to stuff it down. I get up thinking “well, it’s time to go anyway. I have to things to do, groceries, work…” She pulls me back down. Sit. Sit with it.
Astringent Willow knows how to hold water, the water of your tears and of your heart and your tender body. She is rhythmic - she learned from the water, or maybe the water learned from the rhythm of her branches swinging in the summer breeze. A bitter taste, she associates us to the present, a gentle nudge with a firm hand, an extension of a strong heart. Willow, long time basket-weaving material, she has literally been holding our shit for us, carrying our loads, easing our burdens.
Thank you dear willow, good friend, old friend.
Rosemarinus officinalis
Rosemary is nostalgia. She is memory. Rosemary has long been a symbol of friendship and the memories of friends now gone. But those of us who work with the otherworld and the plants know that symbol means portal, means direct line of communication.
To whisper her english name is to call upon two faces of the Divine Mother herself, The Rose and Mother Mary - grace. When I lived in the city, I would not pass by a bush of Rosemary without crushing a needle between my fingers and taking a deep inhale, often taking her into to my mouth, into my body.
She helps you remember who you are, a teacher of mine once said.And memory often holds pain, holds grief, holds the recognition of loss.
Rosemary holds this with us and helps us as we call to the present that woman, that girl, that person who we once were or haven’t yet gotten the chance to be.
Thank you good friend, old Rosemary, who was known by my grandmothers passed and passed and passed.
Crategus monogyna
Hawthorn. Bringer of blood, of life and spirit, to the very heart itself. Grief can not be tended without the heart. The squeezing of the chest, the choking back feeling, the final release of sweet salty wails that reveal how deeply we have loved all that has been lost and changed over. Aliments of the heart can often be seen when a life of unfelt grief has been lived.
Become small and nestle close to her trunk. Her thorns will protect you as you feel your way down into your heart, bringing life blood, the blood of your spirit, to the electrical organ so central to our well being, to our human being.
Thank you, Holy Thorn, for offering me shelter as I am cracked open.
Urtica dioica
Nettle calls us alive. Nettle is life itself, the life blood of the earth. Drink a strong infusion of nettle and tell me it does not give blood of the earth.
When I harvest nettle, I do so with my bare hands. The sting reminds me of my barrier, of where I end and the world begins, a boundary that can be oh so helpful and deeply associating when moving through great grief. Great Grief also requires Great Energy. It is no small thing, asking much of our animal bodies. Nettle gives us capacity. The minerals and the nutrients and the blood of the earth given right to our very own blood, the blood that hawthorn is pumping to our holy hearts, hearts held by Willow as we float on the scent Rosemary’s ancient memory. And Yarrow… well yarrow.
Achellia millefolium
Yarrow. The great protector. She kept Achilles and his soldiers alive on many accounts, a protector of protectors, of the ones who fight for their people. A lung opening herb, she stirs up stagnant grief settled at the bottom of the lungs. You know it - the unrelenting cough that comes at some point during the wild wails, the opening of the chest and dropping of the shoulders, and the deeper breaths of new air available after the grief washed you clean. Yarrow is a friend to that place.
Thank you nettle, green giver of good life. And Yarrow opener, protector.
Tincture formula given to me by willow for holding grief that feels too big for my body:
Willow (40%)
Hawthorn Berry (35%)
Yarrow (20%)
Cinnamon (5%)
Take 3 drops to 2 droppers, 3x/day with a prayer to your heart.
Written, with heart, by Madrone.
