Warning!! Be careful where you gather your dandelions!

You could be tasered for your troubles!

Wolf Medicine (Agrimony)

"Totem" animals - Wolf, Badger, Eagle, Rabbit, Mouse, Mole, Ant ..

Many of us - modern White folks - who have probably never met a wolf or badger or any other truly wild animal, let alone shared an environment with them all our lives, have nevertheless found ourselves drawn to the idea of Totem Animals as our companions and teachers. Never mind that our understanding of the true nature of these animals in the wild can only be, at best, on an intellectual level.

We seem to have a yearning. A longing. An ancestral memory of the time, many many generations ago, when our own forefathers and foremothers lived perhaps not so differently from the way that the Native peoples of North America were living when European explorers "discovered" them. After all, in the distant past, long, long before those explorers set out, even we Europeans were once "Native peoples" in our own lands. We once knew our own animals intimately - and they knew us. Do we not have the right to rekindle that old understanding that lies hidden in our genes?

Because this post fits into both categories - herbal medicine and spirit medicine - the rest of it can be found on my other blog, here

The many moods of monarda (beebalm or bergamot mint)

(click to embiggen the pics please)

I can't think of another plant that has as many names hung on it as this one. But then again, it's a plant that has more uses than most, too, so I guess it's fitting enough. I like to call it "sweetleaf", most Canadians and British types call it bergamot mint, or just plain bergamot, Americans seem to call it bee balm .. which is confusing, since we Canadians sometimes call lemon balm bee balm .. see? It's crazy!

Monarda is in the mint family, but it's not a minty mint like spearmint or peppermint. While it shares the minty mints' nifty combination of heating/cooling sensations, it often has a spicy taste that is more akin to that other cousin in the mint family, oregano, and in some cases, monarda has a buttery feel to the leaves that as far as I know is all its own.

Take no prisoners

Ah, my faithful readers, your writer rages on. Against the machine, against its insidious tentacles that ensnare and enslave and pick our pockets and pick our souls to pieces like crows over a corpse. I rage against the insanity of our commodity culture, where we - our body parts and our sickness and our vulnerability - are one of the most profitable commodities of all.

To read the rest of this post, head on over to my new blog - The Angry Herbalist

The tribe

I'm supposed to be making strawberry jelly right now, from the berries we picked yesterday from our favourite "I don't spray" strawberry farmer's fields. I simmered them down - with some of last year's (frozen) apple peels and cores so I don't have to use commercial pectin - last night; the gorgeous red juices have dripped into a bowl and are waiting for me to get off my butt.

I also have to make a big batch of chilli, get that huge tray of chicken thighs in the fridge marinating for the chicken marbella .. oh, and I kinda have to make some extra bread to freeze, too. There's a heat wave coming our way in a few days; a week long, highs in the 100's, nobody-wants-to-cook-in-that-kind-of-weather heat wave. I have to get ready, or at least as ready as I can, with at least some pre-cooked meals. It's not like we have restaurants up here!

But what am I doing instead of all that? I'm contemplating making yet more coffee and thinking about tribes. Actually, I'm thinking about the tribe I know is out there but I'm unlikely to meet - my tribe. Those who, like me, don't see a mass of green when they see a forest or a meadow, they see individuals, they see 'the standing people', as the First Nations peoples call them.

Tincture of Rice Krispies - (Pine Pollen 2)

It's a drag being trapped in the house in the winter time, but trapped in the house in summer is painful. It's so green and lush out there but we can only look and sigh ..

Why are we trapped in the house?

BUGS!!

In some ways, this being a peak year for insects is a good thing. Those goddamn blackflies and horseflies and deerflies and mosquitoes don't just get by on a steady diet of blood, they're also pollinators. (Well some of them are, I don't know if they all are). And they're food for birds and other critters. Circle of life, and all that. I certainly don't begrudge the frogs and swallows their due.

But this year, by some cruel (to us and the other mammals) twist of fate, these bugs that usually come in stages - first one evil blood sucking, itchy welt producing menace and then the next - are overlapping, God help us.

Right this minute, they all lurk outside our door.

Pine Pollen Ponderings (1) - gathering information

I'm kinda kicking myself here - this was supposed to be the year I get into working with pine pollen and I didn't even think about it until the last possible moment. Grrr! That's probably the trickiest part of working with nature, getting the timing right. Blink and the season for (fill-in-the-blank) is over; you have to wait another year.

Up until the last couple of days I didn't know a whole heck of a lot about pine pollen. I've never used it nor spoken to anyone who has, which leaves me only the literature to go on .. and since pine pollen is right up there in hype-ville with chaga, the "literature" consists mostly of the questionable ravings of body builders and other testosterone addicts and of course page after page of advertorials.