62 Elecampane and Mullein: Herbs for Healthy Lungs in the Cold Season
“Gather close. Keep the warmth at the center. And breathe, slowly, together, until the light comes back.”
Tag: seasonal living
61 Samhain: The Ancestors’ Table and the Turning of the Celtic Year
We’ve been thinking all week about why this season matters so much, especially for those of us who’ve lived long enough to have a long table of the dead. When we’re young, Samhain is spooky. It’s about ghosts and masks and being a little bit afraid of the dark. But somewhere in midlife, it changes. The dark isn’t strange anymore. It’s full of people we love.
And there’s another turning that comes with it, if we let it. At some point, we realize that we are going to be somebody’s ancestor. The recipes we make, the way we tend a garden, the herbs we teach our granddaughters to recognize along the roadside, the way we speak to people in the checkout line. Someday someone will set a plate for us. Someday someone will make our soul cakes, or our version of them, and won’t quite get them right, and will laugh about it, and say our name.
That doesn’t feel morbid to me. It feels like the most ordinary kind of hope. It means the table goes on.
57 Mabon: The Balance Of Light And Dark, And The Rising Of The Harvest Moon
“The second harvest is where gratitude stops being a feeling and starts being a practice.”
56 Elderberry Syrup for Cold Season: The Herbal Craft of Putting By
“Putting by isn’t only about pantries. It’s a whole way of moving through a year — noticing what’s abundant, and doing the quiet, unglamorous work of making sure it doesn’t…
55 The Sturgeon Moon and the Second Eclipse: Light at the Full
The Sturgeon Moon rises full this week under the shadow of a partial lunar eclipse in Virgo, the second doorway of this eclipse season. Join this week’s ritual of charging dried herbs beneath the moon, and trace the old grain-harvest folklore that still echoes through it.
53 Yarrow for Wounds & Boundaries| When the Sun Goes Dark
“It is only changing into a different kind of alive.”
52 John Barleycorn & the First Loaf: The Story of Lughnasadh
“The field gives back what the field was given.”
51 Motherwort | The Lion-Hearted Mother
Motherwort — Leonurus cardiaca, the lion-hearted herb — is bitter medicine for a racing heart. In this episode, Brenda explores the plant’s centuries-old reputation for steadying anxiety and menopausal heat, the astrological history linking her to Leo the lion, and how to meet her as the sky turns toward this week’s Aquarius full moon.
49 The Lavender Drawer
“Home was never the walls. Home is the tending — whatever small territory you care for on purpose.”
48 After the Sun: Cancer’s First Whisper
“We climbed all this way for the light. And the light, having reached us, turns us gently back toward home.”