Alchemy of Life
The sweetest of things on this first day of March is the sight of hundreds of delicate, tender, eager slivers of green emerging from their earthen beds. Waking from a deep sleep, having kept safe through the long winter an immense amount of potential life, bestowed upon them from nurturing parents last season. Seeds, wonders, essence. And with such utterly silent secrecy they break their dormancy, seeking air and light. This green alchemy, how so much food and medicine and life is contained in such a fragment of matter, strikes me as a miracle year after year. Seeds turn the invisible into the substantial, knitting together tall stems, countless leaves, and heavy fruit from molecules less apparent to us than the wind.
When I bury each of these seeds in their prepared beds of soil, I can’t help but eagerly check on them day after day until I am greeted with tiny foliage, which I was always expecting but gives me the purest sense of joy and surprise all the same. It’s the soundlessness of it all. We humans make so much noise and are surrounded with a grand symphony of life proceeding around us in such a continuous manner, that it’s almost more than we can comprehend when these promises of life spring into being with no fanfare, no sound, no ego.
The ancient Celtics recognized two parts to a year. The light half and the dark half. We do our best to make it through the dark half of the year, and there is respite and wonder in the dark months, but it is in this moment, as we feel the emergence and persistence of the light half staking a claim to our days, that we take deeper breaths, turn our faces toward the sky, smell the warming earth, and feel the promise of renewal and life again. These germinating seeds tell of warming and lengthening days, of early breakfasts, mornings of work as the sun is rising, buds are opening, precious pollinators return with a soft hum, and nothing is taken for granted. We make the most of these changing and uncertain times, leaning into the light half, perpetuating and sustaining life on the small scale that we can. We plan, and we plant, and we tenderly love and labor in this dirt. It is this love and labor that feed and heal us, silently showing promises of another tomorrow that will eventually be brighter than today.
-Jenn
To Heal the Hands
With our hands we can build, we can grow, we can feed, we can love, we can calm, we can encourage, we can hold together. And yet, these five-fingered tools we are born with are too easily taken for granted.
Plants give us great healing power in the form of plant butters, oils, and compounds that lock in moisture, soothe rashes, inhibit the growth of bad bacteria, and speed cellular regeneration to close cuts, cracks, and scrapes.
These are some of our favorite ways that use all-natural plant healing to give comfort back to our life-weathered hands.
Made with a combination of the most nourishing plant butters, this body butter provides deep moisture in our most non-greasy formula. It absorbs quickly and will leave even your roughest skin feeling silky smooth.
This deeply healing, all-purpose salve soothes chapped and dry skin, protects from environmental factors, nourishes, and moisturizes. It's especially effective as an after-sun salve, to cool heat, inflammation, and redness. It provides healing for contact burns, windburns, sunburns, rashes, and blisters. It’s also antibacterial, antimicrobial, anti-inflammatory, and helps regenerate new cells.
To Heal the Body
Our physical and mental wellbeing is sometimes a tenuous thing. Our bodies are sacred, holding the essence of who we are while we walk this earth. A little self-care goes a long way to restoring and re-invigorating our minds and limbs, so we can keep on keeping on as our best selves.
Rose, Calendula, Jasmine, Lavender, Arnica, and Chamomile flowers are blended together then infused with jasmine, ylang-ylang and sweet orange essential oils to create a restorative bath soak experience.
This blend of flowers is not only deeply relaxing, it helps to relieve sore and tense muscles while rejuvenating your senses.
This elixir is an essential general wellness tonic for men and women. It is full of vitamins and minerals, offers immune support, and is a general liver tonic and kidney support. With botanicals like wild nettles, oat straw, ginger, and dandelion root, this elixir will fortify you for whatever the day has in store.
This herbal blend is made with herbs to help support the optimal function of the liver and kidneys, providing overall lymphatic support, and aiding in the detoxification of multiple body systems. Use it to help aid digestion in the same way you would use digestive bitters, before eating a meal, or before consuming something high in fat, to help prime your digestive system to better handle food and increase digestive enzymes. Drink a hot cup to help with bloating, gut cramps, and general fatigue.
We Stand with Ukraine
Typically, at the end of our journal we offer a recipe using traditional medicinal botanicals to bring something fun and tasty to your kitchen. However, the world over is feeling the heartbreak and tragedy of Ukrainian men, women, children, families, and landscapes as displacement and destruction shatter the quiet.
We want to use this space and this platform to highlight Ukrainian voices. The following is a poem written by the Ukrainian author Serhyi Zhadan.
So I’ll talk about it
Written by Serhiy Zhadan and translated by John Hennessy and Ostap Kin
So I’ll talk about it:
about the green eye of a demon in the colorful sky.
An eye that watches from the sidelines of a child’s sleep.
The eye of a misfit whose excitement replaces fear.
Everything started with music,
with scars left by songs
heard at fall weddings with other kids my age.
The adults who made music.
Adulthood defined by this—the ability to play music.
As if some new note, responsible for happiness,
appears in the voice,
as if this knack is innate in men:
to be both hunter and singer.
Music is the caramel breath of women,
tobacco-scented hair of men who gloomily
prepare for a knife-fight with the demon
who has just crashed the wedding.
Music beyond the cemetery wall.
Flowers that grow from women’s pockets,
schoolchildren who peek into the chambers of death.
The most beaten paths lead to the cemetery and water.
You hide only the most precious things in the soil—
the weapon that ripens with wrath,
porcelain hearts of parents that will chime
like the songs of a school choir.
I’ll talk about it—
about the wind instruments of anxiety,
about the wedding ceremony as memorable
as entering Jerusalem.
Set the broken psalmic rhythm of rain
beneath your heart.
Men that dance the way they quench
steppe-fire with their boots.
Women that hold onto their men in dance
like they don’t want to let them go to war.
Eastern Ukraine, the end of the second millennium.
The world is brimming with music and fire.
In the darkness flying fish and singing animals give voice.
In the meantime, almost everyone who got married then has died.
In the meantime, the parents of people my age have died.
In the meantime, most heroes have died.
The sky unfolds, as bitter as it is in Gogol’s novellas.
Echoing, the singing of people who gather the harvest.
Echoing, the music of those who cart stones from the field.
Echoing, it doesn’t stop.