Returning to Place and Plant

We recently crossed the threshold of Imbolc and are beginning to feel the first stirrings of spring. It is a time of renewal, an invitation to check in with ourselves, to look at how we have been doing things, what we have learned, and what may need adjusting before we move fully into the active energy of the coming season.

With the UK and the world’s political climate at the moment, Suneet and I have been remembering more profoundly the school’s values and our ‘why’, the deep and passionate reason that stokes the fire of our creation and fuels our eight month apprenticeship. At the heart of what we share is a devotion to connection - connection to place, land and life. We hold an embodied trust from our personal experience’s that the plant kingdom offers a powerful doorway through which we can learn, heal, and return to birth right of loving, balanced relationship with our diverse living world.

Our local landscape, our extended biology. The soil, the weather, the animals, plants growing close by,

All of this is where our relationship begins.

In this season of renewal, I find my heart and mind returning to the importance of being rooted in our immediate surroundings, the living world that meets us as we step out of our door each day.

I recently read an article by the Institute of Natural Law describing place based knowledge as “accumulated wisdom born from sustained attention to a specific location, understanding its patterns, its history, its people, and how everything interconnects.” That definition felt like a clear articulation of what we begin to cultivate through the apprenticeship. Over the eight months of the Shamanic Herbalism Apprenticeship, we teach principles and practices that can be returned to throughout our lives - ways of engaging with the living world that foster true, meaningful, embodied, and a multi-sensory understanding of the Plants we form relationships and conversations.

The Shamanic Herbalism Apprenticeship is a place-based learning experience. We spend time in nature getting to know our native plants and medicinal herbs. We share practices that have emerged from Indigenous teachings, practices rooted in the relationship between people, place, and plant.

Ethnobotany has long been one of my great passions, and I have been (and continue to be) on a long journey of coming back into relationship with place. I experience our plant kin as generous, giving and deeply healing. Through relationship with them we anchor ourselves in interconnectedness and root once more into the landscape. We enter into a greater conversation with life, to be met and known by the world, and to know and love the world in return.

In this way, reciprocity is no longer something we have to remember to do or practice. It becomes a natural emergence of shared love, all we have to do is choose to connect and tend those relationships, slow down, notice and get to know our great plant allies.

An Invitation:

This season, the invitation is to find three plants and observe them. Notice how they change over the course of the year. When do they flower? What do they need? What is their name?

As you move through the seasons with these three plants, simply pay attention and notice, let curiosity be your guide. In doing so, you begin the first threads of a beautiful conversation. And who knows where that conversation may lead you on your path.

FOR ALL OUR RELATIONS.