Herbalism school

I’m about 7 years old, at my grandmother’s apartment, and in my memory there are no grown ups around. I suddenly feel a wave of nausea hit me out of nowhere. I head towards the bathroom in a panic. After a minute it subsides (crisis averted) but I still feel awful and I find myself really wanting some of the nettle tea that is always kept in a thermos on the kitchen counter. I go and pour myself some. I feel better immediately. I’ve never been told before that nettle tea will settle an upset stomach, but this medicine seemed right.

I’m at work processing herbs for tea. I wasn’t sure I’d make it in today - an unresolved illness has me calling out sick often in the last 2 months. I’m glad I’m here. I work through raspberry leaves, motherwort, nettle, echinacea flowers, lemon balm, lemon verbena, apple mint, lemon basil. I notice I am partial to herbs that poke, sting, scrape. Even with gloves on, the spikes on raspberry branches will make you work slowly as you remove the leaves. Those motherwort flowers will hurt if you don’t pay attention to their placement along the stalks. Echinacea seed heads will sink into your skin needle-like. The dried nettle sting is just a soft echo of its potency when fresh, and I focus in to hear it, gentle and transient. The lemon verbena branches always leave barely-there scrapes up my forearms as I reach to the very bottom of the bag where the loose leaves collect. I feel in conversation with these plants when I work with them. They speak back in the language of sensation on skin, living beings, animated, vital.

In the early summer, the nettle by the creek on my street is tall enough and I climb closer to the water to collect some. I harvest it with my bare hands, like every grandmother in my lineage before me.

I look at the “starred” section of my email inbox and I’m confronted by how many herbalism classes and memberships I’ve signed up for in the last 12 months that have been untouched. It has been a bad year for applying myself to my passions with any kind of rigour. In one of the only workshops I attended live, my friend Anka taught a wealth of Ukrainian herbalism knowledge passed on from her grandmother’s decades of practice. I wrote copious notes, using the Ukrainian herb names for section titles. Now, when I meet a new herb, the first thing I do is translate it into Ukrainian to see if it triggers any continuity from my short memories living on the land I belong to.

I am staring at a bowl of dried herbs that I’m about to put away into paper storage bags. I cannot possibly ask Bay, my boss, one more time whether I’m looking at basil or lemon basil. I could probably guess if I really tried to, but listen, I’m in my head about the basils at this point. I work at a place where I was trusted to harvest and dry elderflowers and dyer’s coreopsis independently in my first year, and where I’m absolutely allowed to ask my basic basil question repeatedly in my second. I later send Bay an Instagram post titled “how I feel asking my boss a question” that has a picture of Cam from Modern Family standing in a half-curtesy.

There are a few small bunches of St. John’s Wort growing wild around my yard, but the one I planted in my raised garden bed produced only one flower this year. That’s the one I pick for the hospice altar in July, along with some lemon balm, yarrow, and lavender. I can’t be sure if I’m doing this for the one crossing the threshold or the ones staying back. But I feel my feet firmly on both sides of that passageway, and though I’ve never been told what to do in such a devastating and mundane situation, this medicine seems right.