Following the Trail of Abundance
Ten years ago when I started this business I sat down to name it. So much of a story can be told through a name, and words hold weighty power. At the time I was crafting only a few items: mostly salves, a tea blend or two, and a few tinctures. I hand-harvested every single botanical ingredient I used, plant by plant and leaf by leaf. I took long treks into the wildest places I could find, along the coastlines of the Pacific, deep into old growth forests, through the high desert, and up steep mountain trails. The entirety of my medicine cabinet was sourced from the wild, so I finally landed on The Wilderness Maven for the products I crafted. But the word wilderness held so much more for me than just the places I foraged. Wilderness is just as much a place as it is a feeling.
The word wilderness evokes images of untamed places, carpets of green, wild creatures who flee under the cover of boughs, a sky that can subject interlopers to its blazing sun or cleansing rains with only the cover of wild plants for shelter. Wilderness feels abundant in its gifts, boundless, ancient, free, mysterious, both harsh and comforting, thriving in cycles of life and death without the intervention of human rule and order. Wilderness is an awakening to that which is beyond our control. To walk into a place of true wilderness takes bravery, knowledge, respect, and humility. The human race has found ways to reconstruct many things, but wilderness is and will always be inimitable. We have the power to destroy it, but we cannot replicate it.
Each time I harvest a botanical from the wild, I am filled with awe, reverence, and tenderness for the way plants thrive without our hand and then give us their gifts when asked. A couple weeks ago I harvested rosehips with the intermittent sun on my face, the smell of rich, vibrant soil under my boots and browning grasses whispering in dance around me. As I harvested the ripe, ruby red fruits my mind drifted to all the ways this plant offers her medicine. Not only in the form of the blossoms, leaves and fruits themselves, but a powerful and compelling medicine for the soul. Wandering around the rose bushes, reaching my hands as deep as they would reach into the thorny branches, receiving cuts and scrapes for my labor, grounding myself completely in the place I was in, I felt so alive. Alive and so grateful that medicine can come from a place like this, packed with so much more healing than what boils down to the chemical makeup of what lives inside a pharmacy. That’s not to say the medicine of man is not life-saving and invaluable in its own right, only to say that medicine is not merely chemical and the medicine from under the untamed sky brings a lightness and joy-filled healing to both the spirit and anatomical person.
I suppose it’s fitting that my thoughts drifted this direction while harvesting rosehips, as rose has long been used as medicine for the emotional heart. It is rose’s season to heal the heart and soothe the soul.
No flower in history has been so intimately linked
with human affairs as the rose; its story is the record
of a flower that has left its influence on the lives, the
customs, even the destinies of nations. In war and
peace, in joy and sorrow, in kings’ castles and
cotters’ homes, in religion and art and music, that
influence appears in song and story, and though the nations that knew her have long passed away, the rose, which has seen a hundred generations come and go, remains unchanged in character though improved in form. When we learn something of this influence, we can understand why it is that for more than twenty-five-hundred years, the rose has ruled uninterruptedly as queen of flowers.
-from My Friend the Rose by Fancis E Lester, 1942
Ancient cultures began working with rose for both the fragrance and the healing it provided. Rose tea was prized for its cooling and calming effects on the body and nervous system (though the term “nervous system” was coined much later, they still knew rose calmed and gentled the inner being), and for rose’s ability to balance the body’s energy and relieve emotional stress and anxiety.
Rose is an astringent plant, meaning it tightens and tones inflamed tissue wherever the medicine makes contact, internally and topically. It is especially wonderful for burns, as the cooling nature combined with the astringency help to promote healing. The astringency also lends itself to rose as a powerful cardiotonic, or heart-strengthening herb. Spiritual and emotional healing are not out of line with physical healing. After all, we are more than the sum of our body parts. Just as the medicine of rose can strengthen the physical heart and soothe a physical burn, so too can it soothe emotional burns and our emotional heart. The luscious blossoms and sharp thorns of the plant pass on medicine that helps us to be beautifully open to the world and yet maintain distinct boundaries. Rose is a powerful heart-opening medicine, strengthening and softening those who are grief stricken, lonely, or struggling with how to love one’s self. Rose brings back the sweetness and pleasure to life.
Rosehips, the swollen red fruits left behind after the flower petals fall, are nutritive powerhouses packed with vitamin C and naturally antimicrobial. You’ll find I add rosehips to many of my formulas, both in the skincare I make and in the internal preparations I craft. Herbalism is a practice in ancient traditions and while it has gained a new vocabulary with the study of plant constituents and actions, the act of partnering with specific plants to shape our health, wellness and vitality is as old as humankind. So while I work with rose in all its incarnations, I was inspired to dig into a more ancient and traditional method for extracting goodness from the soft, fresh hips. Fermentation is a beautiful way to break down the chemical structure of a plant and form it into something new and effervescent, maintaining the integral parts and re-making them into something altogether more abundant. A lovely reflection of the internal work we do in our lifelong journey to re-make ourselves into more abundant beings, yearning and learning to seek the wilderness within. The amount of life in a finished ferment, in the form of billions of microorganisms, is alluring and sublime. This thriving colony of life is well known to be beneficial for our gut biome, but I want to explore the ways in which it can benefit our skin, the brave surface we face the world with each and every day.
Over the next few months I’m going to be fermenting wild, bio-regional fruits and botanicals and slow-extracting a careful selection of plants that each contribute beautifully to radiant skin health. It’s a beautiful process, though not a quick one, providing the space and time to reflect on my relationship with the plants themselves and the integrity of taking my time for a result that is far superior to rapid gratification. The process is wild, a feast on natural sugars and wild yeasts. An abundant process and a study in abundance. As my rosehip harvest quietly bubbles away on the counter, I’m already looking forward to the next time I can slip away into a wild place and quietly gather medicine for my body and soul and hopefully, in turn, yours.
Love and herbal tea,
Jenn
