The Apothecary of Belonging: An Introduction
Friends, I wrote a book, and I thought it would be fun to share the introduction with you!
The Apothecary of Belonging: Seasonal Rituals & Practical Herbalism will be in bookstores this November and is currently available for pre-order. Thank you for all of your support and encouragement over the years - this work was shaped by our community and I hope that it is received as a big-hearted thank you.
So if you like hardcover books with built-in bookmarks (fancy!), color illustrations, and a mix of the practical (seasonal indications guides for plant allies!) and the magickal (simple rituals and a unique oracle practice for you to create!), then I hope that you’ll check The Apothecary of Belonging out. Also, all the cute art you’ll see below is from the book!
In the meantime, please enjoy the full introduction from my book and my evergreen gratitude for all of you.
A Place of Belonging
The wheel of the year turns and seasons shift, a dancing pattern of life, death, and transformation, weaving together all that was, is, and shall be. Each of us is woven into the year’s turning, bodies of land sustained by the same earth, air, fire, and water that sustained our ancestors and will sustain all who come after us. All of us are shaped by and shape our entanglements—the well-being of the land, our bodies, and our communities intimately interconnected through a deep kinship. And even though we might forget our interconnectedness, the land always remembers.
The Apothecary of Belonging is an invitation back into the wisdom that, by being of the land, we have always belonged. While many of us may feel disconnected from the land and one another, through working with the seasons of the year we can partake in a profound reconciliation of all parts of ourselves back home to the land, our bodies, and our communities. Within these pages, we’ll work with plant allies and simple rituals to connect with the energy of each season, mixing practical herbalism with inner work, mapping pathways of wisdom, well-being, and sacred relationships.
While this is a book mostly about the seasons of the lands we live with, in many ways it is also a book about bodies. For we are all land - there is no other - and though we may call land by many names, it is from a body of land that we are formed and it is as a body of land that we experience life. We are our physical bodies, mental bodies, emotional heart bodies, and bodies that are shrines for our infinite spirit. We are bodies of land, sea, and sky, as well as bodies that hold memories and stories experienced in our present life, inherited from our family and cultural lines, and carried for generations yet to be. As we seek out belonging and the places in the land within and around us in most need of healing, we travel through time, to sites of old pain and early wounds in the past, all while uprooting the belief that healing is an act of individual willpower and moving forward into futures that we are pulling toward us as much as we are being pulled toward them. Exploring seasonal rhythms of kinship helps us recognize what it is we want to make time and space for, developing the ability to cultivate connection in our lives no matter where we come from or where we might be going.
There are so many ways our ability to feel our belonging can be disrupted. Many of us have complex direct or ancestral experiences of displacement, migration, settlement, and return. Or we have challenging experiences with our family of origin or cultural upbringing that have made us feel like an “other” from an early age. Pernicious and overt systems of oppression work to divide up land - including our land-bodies - keeping us separated by fear-based borders and creating uncertainty around our own inherent dignity and sacredness. What I hope to explore with you in The Apothecary of Belonging is how, rather than a hindrance, the complexity of our land-bodies is an affirmation of our belonging to one another. We are already kin, but it takes practice to develop an intentional and healing relationship with the land and one another.
While the tools needed to dismantle oppressive systems will be as diverse as the people, places, and creatures living under them, there are some simple and useful earth-centered practices everyone can engage with. The central practice I hope to offer is finding connection with the seasonal rhythms of the land as a process of coming home to the healing seasons of your body and the kinship of community. When we begin our healing work from a place of deep knowing we already belong - being inherently of the land -we can begin to untangle beliefs about not being enough, worries about whether we’ll ever fit in, or concerns about finding a place for who we are presently as well as who we are becoming. I want you to be guided by the simplicity and complexity of the changing land to accept that you have always belonged and there is abundant space for all of who you are.
Like many of you, I’ve experienced the discomfort, pain, and confusion of not knowing quite where I belong. As a third-culture kid, mixed womxn, lesbian who is allergic to binaries of all kinds, and someone who has experienced life at different class levels, I’ve had my share of experiences of believing or being told I don’t belong. At the same time, I’ve had profound experiences of belonging that have been life-changing and hope-sustaining. These experiences of otherness and belonging have shaped my practice as an herbalist, and I’m called to help folks cultivate a resilient and persistent sense of belonging regardless of what culture or family or systems of power may want them to believe is possible. I can’t resolve complicated family stories or identities for you, undo the pain of traumatic experiences, or directly place you in a community of loving peers (that would be the most amazing superpower!), but I can help you develop the skills of discernment and self-knowing to recognize how deeply, how profoundly, how beautifully you already belong and how to (re)connect with yourself and the world around you from that place of belonging.
The Path Ahead
Within The Apothecary of Belonging we’ll explore with our plant allies how to know ourselves as land and as beings who deeply belong to the land and each other
through three primary practices:
🌲 Connecting with and telling the story of the land within us
🌿 Observing and engaging with the seasons of the land around us
🕸️ Embodying our kinship through ritual and community practice with the land between us
We’ll begin by getting to know our plant allies, our guides to the land around, within, and between us. Then we’ll learn about the energetic foundations of traditional western herbalism that flow through the seasons within and around us, exploring ways we can map our inner landscape, and then journey through each of the four seasons with plant allies as our guides and companions. In each seasonal chapter, we’ll explore the common themes each part of the year brings as well as ways to connect through your body with the land from breathwork to sacred inquiry.
Each seasonal section also contains an indications-based guide to plant allies for common ailments. Indications are a succinct way of identifying what plants might be most appropriate for a condition through observations of the body. Being able to discern in our body, for example, a dry and hacking cough versus a damp and weak cough is one way to find the best herbs to work with. I have focused on herbs that are generally considered safe with few contraindications, but you should always reference the contraindications appendix as well as look up any plants you want to work with in your trusted materia medica or with an herbalist.
You’ll also find community clinic suggestions in each seasonal chapter. While not every one of us will or wants to work in a community clinic setting, these ideas can easily be applied to personal apothecaries, households, and friend groups, acting as a guide for sharing herbal gifts and making seasonal donations to herbal calls to action, neighbors, and communities in need. There are also simple tea recipes to support your energy season to season, rituals that can be adapted for solo or community practice, including divination techniques for the inner landscape maps you’ll be creating, and lunar blessings to support your remedy-making throughout the year.
Shared Language
As we journey together, I want to begin by defining some of the terms you’ll find here. I use body and land-body interchangeably to refer not only to the physical body, but our emotional, mental, and energetic bodies as well. When I write of bodies, whether our own individual and finite physical forms or bodies of land, I am speaking of bodies in their most expansive and complex forms.
When I speak of ancestors, I am referring to ancestry in the broadest way possible, from familial, cultural, and spiritual ancestors to nonhuman ancestors, including ancestors of place, plant, stone, and water. I use the term kin to refer to human and nonhuman kin alike, and sometimes I use terms like beyond-human kin and kindred to refer to these connections as well. When I write of relationships, it is about relationships of all varieties, not just romantic or family-based. Writing about consultations and clients can refer to professional practice but also encompasses the casual conversations you might have with friends or family members when suggesting herbal care.
Finally, the term traditional western herbalism is an imperfect way of describing not only my training and background as an herbalist, but the vast, complicated, and beautiful path of herbalism that such a phrase is trying to encompass. Traditional refers to the fact that what I practice is derived from ancient and modern herbal practices, from the evidence-based (including Indigenous science) to the folkloric and magickal. Western is much less useful, and I wish there was an alternative for it. Traditional western herbalism has ancient roots in North African, Greek, and Arabic medicine, having journeyed throughout Europe and on to North America, changing and adapting through the centuries. The more I learn about the ways traditional western herbalism developed, the more I’ve come to appreciate and love its multicultural roots. Terms like western, eastern, global south, and global north flatten culture and create misleading binaries about diverse swaths of people, places, and societies. I am sure a better term for this path of herbalism will emerge as language continues to grow more expansive and inclusive. In the meantime, traditional western herbalism is a widely used and recognized umbrella term and a meaningful differentiator from other herbal traditions.¹
While I’ll be wandering through the energetics of traditional western herbalism as a useful form of observation and storytelling, the primary focus of the herbal practice within these pages is building a relationship with our plant allies, which we’ll explore in the next chapter.
As we journey along the path of The Apothecary of Belonging, may each chapter serve as a map, marked with the places where we might find benevolent plant allies and words of magick, simple rituals and skills of connection, as we trust in our shared belonging and travel the wheel of the year back home together.
🌙 📖 🌿
If you want to read more I’d love for you to get a copy of The Apothecary of Belonging from your neighborhood library or local bookstore. Of course, you can also peruse through my complete archive for more herbal and magickal writing. If you liked this introduction, you might enjoy some of my seasonal-focused posts from Between the Seasons series to my series on the wheel of the year.
Thank you again for all of your support over the years - may there be many more years together of exploring the green world and places in-between.
This post was made possible through patron support.
❤︎ Thanks, friends. ❤︎
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Footnotes
1. I spent so much time wrestling with this paragraph and trying to squeeze libraries of complexity into a few sentences - something that I felt nervous to do especially knowing that this was going to right at the front of the book no less! I spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to refer to regions and cultures, going back and forth between increasingly specific to much broader categorizations. If I were to rewrite it I might use a term like SWANA in place of North Africa - one of the biggest points I wrestled with. Still what I wrote works for now and I hope it conveys that traditional western herbalism is a living tradition built upon living traditions, shared at the crossroads of cultures, and changed by all who practice it.
