Tag: The New England Herbary

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.

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.

42 At the Gate of the Year

“This is how we bless ourselves. Not by waiting for someone else to do it. But by bending down to the grass in the early morning light and accepting what the earth is already offering.”