summer time

in june, i started going to an herb class being taught by a really wonderful local herbalist, corinne boyer. there are five other people in the class and we meet every week at corinne and her partner's farm in shelton, wa, which is a rural town near olympia. it's sooooo beautiful, she has 40 acres of woods in which to wildcraft, a stream, pastures, the world's most charming milk cow...and i have been learning a lot! it has been keeping me really excited about the millions of ways to interact with and learn about herbs.
yesterday was one of my favorite classes. we learned about and made a bunch of different smoking blends, smoked them out of wooden pipes and drank cherry wine. i was really excited to learn that you can smoke almost any medicinal herb as a way of getting its benefits, and also that when smoking out of a tobacco-style pipe you don't need to inhale to get the benefit of the smoke, you can just puff on it and your mouth's mucous membranes will absorb the properties. which is wonderful for me, the world's most inelegant inhaler of smoke.
i was especially happy about my smoking blend cause everything in it was either wildcrafted by me or hand picked by someone i knew. it had our local and incredibly magical kind of mugwort (artemisia suksdorffi), sweet annie from the herb pharm, ceanothus leaves from williams, mullein from my classmate, and some hops from corinne's friend. it tasted really artemisian and bitter at first, with a magical sweet annie fragrance afterward.

i've also become totally enchanted with yarrow, a plant i never really noticed before, but it's everywhere here and so beautiful. the bitter, sweetly fetid smell is enchanting. i went wildcrafting in a prairie and found bright creamy white yarrow that smells like rotting honey and sunlight. some pink yarrow came up in my backyard too!
in addition to helping external bleeding, yarrow also has an affinity for all kinds of blood-related things, including cramps and stagnant blood. it is a really strongly purifying and healing and protecting plant. it is also one of those plants is a good example of how wise herbs are; it can both cause and stop the same symptoms, depending on who takes it and in what context. i think that is really magical. yarrow knows what it's doing in there. there's a string of seven bundles of yarrow drying next to my bed and it has made my little room feel like the coziest and witchiest spot.

i hope everyone is well, i miss you all like crazy.
<3