this place.

hey babies, i just found the most inspiring and beautiful thing i've seen in so long...i think i am in love!
dorilandia.com
midnightapothecary.blogspot.com

dori midnight is a radical witch healerrrrr and she makes all kinds of magic things like charmed honey and her own tarot cards and i am just thinking of all the things i wanna do but somehow cannot find the energy to in this long damp winter. thinking about finding meaning in everything, nurturing your power, the sacred things that give you strength. how you can use herbs for their "material" properties as well as the invisible secret magic of them, and how both are equally powerful and valid, i just read the andrew weil article jaime sent me, everything is coming together in a weird sparkling way.

also...i found another herb school in california, why do they get all of them down there? sheesh. new life project, starting an herb school in washington?! anyway, it's called ohlone herbal center and it's in berkeley and looks pretty amazing......ohlonecenter.org

i love all of you, and miss you, and hope you are well!
xxxxxxxooooooo nicole

Flu lessons

I've had the flu or something the past few days, and have learned some things that seem useful - thanks flu! When feeling weak or achy, boneset helps me feel strong and relieved of pain (thank you sCarrie for the tincture!). Maybe a little too much so, because then I think I have energy to do things, and that is not true! When feeling tense and overheated, yarrow helps me feel relaxed and cooled, like being wrapped in comfort - thank you yarrow! All makes me think more, as I've been thinking already, that the seeming need to understand things in a scientific way is seeming funnier and funnier to me when contrasted with personal experience. And in reality, how medicinal plants work is admittedly beyond scientific conception, because only a select few isolated constituents have been proven to do things in even the most studied plants. They're simply too complex for science to fully grasp the interaction with the human body. So why science? Well, ok, yes, it helps to understand things (at least partially) in that way too, and to communicate in an understandable way to the wider culture. But for me it's just far easier to accept that boneset gives strength, yarrow gives comfort, and I give them appreciation (and hopefully some help propagation help).

Hmmmm.....