Welcome to the Path of Song
Songs and herbalism have gone hand and hand for generations - songs are offered to plants at harvesting, sung over them as part of a healing ritual and remedy-making, and used as a way to pass on plant lore. I believe that plants sing to us, too, when we sit with them, as well as in our dreams, or even when we are flipping through the pages of a book, trying to find the herb that'll best fit a client's needs. Having begun our journey together with wonder and then breath, it feels appropriate to find ourselves journeying along the path of song.
The songs you'll find along our path together might be one heard between petal and leaf, on the crest of a wave or tangled up in wood smoke. Maybe it's your own song that is drawing you forward, inward, beyond and between. But there is a song there to be heard, to follow, to spend some time with, as we come to learn how it is we are shaping and singing our own. My own early path into the world of herbalism was strongly shaped by song, including the soundtrack of my early adolescence that accompanied my youthful remedy-making experiments, blasting through my cd player as I mixed herbs and oils in recycled food jars at my altar or in the windowless pantry that I used to use as my tiny, secluded apothecary.
Yet, there was another song that pulled me into the world of plants that felt old, ancestral, wordy and wordless, and full of possibility. While I didn't have much language back then to describe what was happening, I remember the song that I felt flowing through my body when I began to make and use my own herbal remedies to alleviate simple sufferings (a scrap in need of healing, a cold in need of warming). It felt like my body was singing, a hum of resonance with an old but effective way of working with the body to bring about healing. It was a feeling I had felt throughout my childhood whenever I found myself alone with the plants or up in a tree, unknowingly connecting in that way that children often do with the singing hum of earth.
Our ability to express ourselves asks us to find and be in relationship with our voice - something that is relatively easy to understand as a logical instruction, but harder to embody in practice. There are so many ways that we can feel hindered in our self-expression, including being so focused on our individual self and needs that we forget that sound and noise and voice only arises in a complex environment of breath and exchange and understanding. Holding our breath or our wonder or our song for too long can create tension in the body, we need regular outlets of self-expression - our figurative or literal song - in order to regulate breath and wonder (and grief and love and joy and all of our emotions!) throughout our body. To sing in a state of deep resonance with ourselves and our world is to engage in focused listening not only with how we hear ourselves, but the songs of others, including plant song.
The shape of your song will be unique to you, changing and shifting with the tides and tangles of your own life, flowing through all parts of our personal timelines. The shape of our song from childhood might come back as a lifeline during a tumultuous period in our middle age or a song of our ancestors might flow through us when we are at most in need of their guiding wisdom. The song of the land may sing to us as we traverse the path of our callings, helping us to discern what turn to take, what places to avoid or where to extend our roots. The land, our bodies, and our relationships are full of song and we have endless opportunities to respond to and add our own noise.
As a witch, our song shapes our magick.
As an herbalist, our song helps to sing the soul back into the body and bring us into communion with our plant kin.
As a community, our song helps bring us into common resonance with one another - and sometimes it helps us find each other when the path is dark and the night is long.
As we explore the path of song, we'll spend time with our throat, home of our voice box and vocal cords, where the sounds of our voice take shape. Even if we don't rely on our vocal cords to communicate, the noise that passes through our throat, be it laughter, humming, sighing or sounds of shock, remains a form of communication. Energetically, the throat represents communication and self-expression, the place where both physically and energetically our deeper inner world arises to the surface. In our earliest years our voice is shaped by the language we're given, the nurturance or lack thereof that we're provided, and the cultural myths that set the stage for our own stories to unfold. As we grow older, explore new paths than the familiar ones tread during childhood, and live through experiences challenging, sublime, boring and intense, we start to discover our own voice, becoming familiar with its tenor and rhythm. Some of us will experience dramatic shifts in the nature of our voice while others will find the changes to be slow and steady undulations. Coming to know our voice and what we are trying to express, whether born of wonder or breath or some other feeling, is what opens the way for us to find our song.
As the Moon waxes to fullness, pay attention to the ways you feel in resonance with your voice and your ability to express yourself in a way that feels affirming to who you are and draws you closer to all that you love. Pay attention, too, to the ways that you experience dissonance with your voice and self-expression, such as reflexively saying sorry when it is not necessary or feeling tension when you speak up or feeling like you lose your voice whenever you try to express something of importance in your life. Let yourself pause along the path, noticing when you say one thing when you'd rather say another or express yourself so clearing you feel like you're shining. Seek out the voices you carry that you are most interested in exploring from your voice as an herbalist or practitioner of magick, your voice in your relationships, and your voice during times of intensity (times when you need to speak up, ask for help, de-escalate a situation, and so on). As we find our voice we are finding the foundation of our song.
For the path of song we'll be journeying into the land of the throat, exploring throat-supporting tonics and the ways that our voice and our song is shaped by the passageways and muscular vibrations of the space between our lungs and head. We'll explore the ways that we can bring our voice into our remedy work during our Full Moon practice, connecting to the ancient human tradition of making song.
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.
