Welcome to the Path of Relics
Our paths as herbalists and plant folks, as healers and witches, wanders through landscapes varied and wild, filled with the spirits of the land appearing as mountain and forest, river and meadow. Along those paths there are also the relics - those objects both familiar but not-quite-known, that seem to appear on our path again and again no matter where we travel to. A relic may appear as a childhood toy that exudes a feeling of safety; the shape of light that one afternoon before everything changed; or the scent of an old love, sharp edges of grief tucked into an old stone cairn. Our path is full of these relics that take the shape of our personal history but were also formed by the stories of people gone before us.
To sit with plants and people is to sit with relics and the stories they tell. The relics we encounter collectively as herbalists and plant folk are many - hidden in "old wive's tales"¹ or particular ways of doing things passed between teachers to their students.² You'll also encounter relics in consultations with clients or the friends and family you sit with over cups of tea - such as beliefs they carry around as absolute truths about what healing is and how much ease in their life they are "worthy" of. Coming across these relics are an opportunity to sit, build a fire, get curious, and listen. Working with the relics we stumble across on our path is memory work as well as ancestor work, drawing us into conversation with the ways our bodies react to and process experiences, and how we find the words we give to the songs of our stories. Sitting with relics is to sit with questions like "Where did the words for our songs come from?" and "Who sang these songs before me?"
These beliefs, formed in our past and calcified into relics we continue to encounter on our present path of healing, are complex things. While the symptoms of these beliefs can show up in any body system, the roots often lie in the nervous system.³ In many ways, relics are memories with deep roots in our nervous system: they are the old songs of our ancestors carved into our bones, the warnings from our aunties not to go out into the woods after dark, all the lessons scrapped together from confusing, strange, harmless-enough-but-unsettling encounters from young adulthood, and the scars that can only be gained through a long life. Often these relics are invisible until they are not, showing up in the middle of our path when we thought there was nothing there before. They remind us that we carry parts of where we have been before with us, even when the path has taken us far away from that original moment. As herbalists and plant folk these relics are reminders of the cyclical nature of our work - that healing is often a process of walking away from, returning to, and journeying off again.
These relics remind us that there was someone here before us - and that someone was us. Sometimes relics are frightening, appearing at distressing moments like when we're suddenly pulled back into a place of fear when a coworker unintentionally says something too familiar to the words of a cruel school bully and we find ourselves ready to defend ourselves. Or they are joyful objects that encompass us like a cloud of perfume, like when a song comes on the radio that brings us back to one of our favorite summers from our earlier years. A lot of work with relics happens, very appropriately, in therapeutic spaces, but when we encounter them as herbalists (or just empathetic people listening to a friend), we can approach them with reverence, honoring them as waymarkers at place of deep-rooted connection to a person's emotional landscape. Of course, the greater challenge is learning how to apply the same reverence to our own relics, especially the ones that scare us.
As the Moon waxes from New to Full, pay attention to the relics you find yourself trying to avoid, from ways of reacting emotionally to the world that feel predestined but not desirable to the relics you happily revisit as a source of gentleness (i.e. your tea time biscuits that you've been enjoying since you were a kid that fill you with the best sort of nostalgia). Get curious about the relics you avoid, the ones you happily make pilgrimage to, and what it is you might want to shift energy around. Noticing relics is one of the biggest healing steps we can take, because we've chosen to continue along our path even knowing we might encounter things ahead that we thought we left behind.
As a witch, relics are places of power, marking intersecting energetic points in our personal landscape.
As an herbalist, these relics help us to pour healing herbal remedies directly into the lay of the inner landscape.
As a community, relics are a way of understanding where we've come from, acting as waymarkers for those who'll come after us.
Exploring the path of relics, we'll connect with the energy of our nervous system as a vast delta plain of experiences stretching back into the ancient world of our childhood and beyond. We'll explore nervous system supporting tonics and the ways that our nervous system reacts and responds to the world shaped by the roots of our relics. We'll explore the ways that we can bring a healing relationship to our relics into our remedy work during our Full Moon ritual where we'll build a living altar of healing.
I hope you feel encouraged to participate in the ways that feel the most interesting and inspiring to your practice, reach out to your fellow journeyers, and bring what you learn and love back to the land you live with and the communities you love.
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Footnotes
1. Blessed be the old wives and spinsters and lesbian aunties who preserved our herbal traditions.
2. These include debates on whether or not herbs should be tinctured whole (i.e. aerial parts, roots, flowers, altogether in one jar - very popular in the US) or separated out (i.e. roots in one jar, leaves in another, etc - much more popular in the UK).
3. I am not suggesting that all illness is caused by not enough therapy or emotional healing - yikes, no. Rather, I'm highlighting the ways that we believe things about our illness or health challenges can affect our physical body (studies around pain and neuroplasticity show some fascinating connections to old injuries and current beliefs), but can really affect our social body and beliefs that we deserve care or help in the first place.
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