(excerpted from a newsletter sent 6/29/23)

Dear friends,

I wasn't planning on writing a newsletter anytime soon. A good number of the herbs in my garden are starting to come into their fullness and I had set aside this entire week to make much-needed medicine for the shop. Yarrow tincture and oil, wood betony elixir, feverfew tincture, motherwort tincture and oil, and lavender tincture to name a few, not to mention all of the other herbs I've been looking forward to bundling and hang-drying literally all over my house. Unfortunately the smoke has been pouring in, we're stuck inside, and I'm reluctantly finding other things to do while we wait out the truly terrible air. Cue newsletter.

Ecologically speaking, it's been a tough start to summer ~ severe drought and now the smoke. The plants, normally buzzing with life and color this early in the season, look tired and stunted. We're noticing more and more animals coming up to our home looking for food and water. If exposure to today's AQI is the equivalent of smoking 9 cigarettes, I worry for the songbirds and their tiny lungs.

Nick recently introduced me to the term "pyrocene" ~ the age of fire ~ and what scientists have started calling this new climatological era we've only just begun. It's wild to me to have moved back to the Midwest during some of the worst wildfires on the west coast, to a place that felt like refuge, a watery place (the wateriest place), but right now (and every summer since being back) a place of styrofoam skies and dried up marshes, wilting trees and desperate animals. The utter lack of control is unnerving. I wish I could whisper to the sky and summon rain clouds, don't you?

I'm currently enrolled in Flowering Round with Liz Migliorelli of Sister Spinster (a long-term teacher of mine), an eight-month flower essence practitioner course. In her teaching, Liz really emphasizes essence-making as a way to be in deep and present relationship with place, and that making essences is fundamentally a devotional practice.

You don't make a willow flower essence because Dr. Bach says it's for easing tension, you make a willow essence because you've been watching them for a month (ever since the cranes came back to the marsh) and you know they're going to bloom second to only the marsh marigolds, for just a week or so, when the days start to warm up but it's still so cold at night. And because willow flowers are one of the first foods for the honeybees who visit and return home to their hives dusty and yellowed, and that the first precious honey of the year will be willow honey. Because in the summer their minty, silvery leaves glow against the neon green of the hills, and you know that where there's a willow, there's a way—to water. Cleansing, cooling, hydrating, flowing. Willow, the tree that likes to "keep its feet wet," that sometimes weeps. The prolific and resilient tree that's used to make baskets and brooms and divining rods. Soother of pain, beloved by blackbirds and snakes and spiders. The "soft" "junk" tree that falls apart and re-sprouts from itself for generations.

Maybe I can't whisper to the sky and summon rain clouds, but I can put on my mask and go sit with the willows. Check on the creek, check on the mud, listen for the blackbirds. When there's so little else we can do, at least we can still choose where to give our attention. We almost always have the ability to be present to the immediate world around us, which the older I get, the more I tend to believe is one of the most important things we can do. We care more about the things we're paying attention to. And who knows, maybe the willows will help me understand something about the water around here, something about mud, something about rain and no rain, how to keep my feet wet, something about distant wildfire, something about clouds.

Lots of love,

Clare