I am a medicine maker. I grow plants on a tiny farm, forage and gather plants on land (which shall not be identified) and I process my harvest into herbal medicines. I also distribute these medicines and talk about them to everyone who can’t outrun me.

Sometimes I overhear people talk about going back to the land, farming or foraging and living a more “natural” life. I feel like it is nearly impossible to grasp what this “feels” like until you do it.
It is so easy to disparage land-lovers as dirty hippies–and I am indeed soiled– or romanticize the relationship plant folks have with their land. The truth is, as usual, somewhere in between.

I can imagine nothing more authentic for myself than my relationship with the plants I love. I am deeply grateful that hunting for a root or mixing up an elixir is my JOB. It is not always easy–folks on the receiving end don’t always grasp that I am a tiny business or the variables within that paradigm. I run out of bubble wrap and my Blessed Thistle seeds all float away. It pours rain and I fall over and the TSA confiscates my darn Felcos. But mainly I am very very lucky to be able to serve.

But more than serving the plants, which I love, and serving the humans, also interesting, I am thankful to be an example of what a medicine maker looks like. I am saying, with my being, that we can do this! I am healing our idea of WHAT medicine IS. And I do not mean to discount standard Western medicine. Not at all. I mean to expand it. Expand our vision of what is possible. Expand our vision of WHO makes medicine, and where, and how. Expand our feeling about medicines, our connections to medicines and our medicinal lineages, rivers that have ebbed and merged but still DO flow.

There is still value in a medicine that has my hands in it, my heart in it and perhaps a memory of the soil it grew in. I accept the responsibility of making medicine with nothing less than joy, I go out to dig and snip and gather with a mission dammit a purpose and thank you, friends, for helping me to heal myself too. I am feeling grateful for the community support and the opportunity to contribute. Heck I even go to the post office with joy because life is just too darn short to lose sight of my mission. I love how there are multiple ways to BE and various ways to heal!
So thank you, friends and community, thank you for listening, for your support and sharing.