One day in August, in Phoenix, I tried to work in my garden. Not just a 10-minute, cursory check-in but a true “work” session, where I lugged bags of new soil, I dug old crusty soil out of my three oversized whiskey barrels, I hoisted said soil bags, I dug some more, etc etc. I was trying to rehabilitate these barrels from the sad, burned state they were in after my blackberry bushes failed over the winter. (Barrels are notoriously hard to keep well-watered in a dry place.) It was 100 degrees by 830am and though I guzzled electrolyte-laden water and kept jumping in the pool, by the end I felt almost high, like I was having an out of body experience, I couldn’t think straight, I cool-showered and laid on the bed and friends, I was pretty much done for the day. I felt like I was walking through molasses. I asked my family members to repeat simple sentences. The headache started that night. Every evening after, a monsoon storm system moved in over the city. Wind, rain, thunder, lightning. Four days later, I went to the ER with what I was sure was brain cancer, my tiny, anxious brain riddled with tumors. Or maybe one giant tumor, positioned over my left eye and temple. Growing exponentially, expanding by the minute.

In the ER, a grizzled, exhausted doctor looked me over, listened to my squinting, dejected story, me going “I’m like, fine? But, I’m also…not fine?” (ha ha, so much to unpack there with my therapist) And he said “I get it. It’s a migraine. We will give you what is called a ‘migraine cocktail.’ Works like a charm. Stay here. We’ll be back.”

What followed was one and a half hours of experiencing exhilarating relief from the headache and falling into a stunned stupor watching a television episode (i.e., The Pitt) unfold around me. The ER was too full so I was positioned with my IV drip in the open area, in full view of all. A man with what I can only assume was a severe stroke kept yell-moaning from behind his curtain in these long, crescendo-ing waves of pain or sadness, I couldn’t tell which. A woman with a clementine-sized lump on her forehead kept trying to take off. Three nurses at once blocked the hallway, going “nope, nope, please senora, back to your bed, please!” At one point the woman put her nurse in a bear hug, aggressively kissing her face. The nurse, rightly, yelled at the top of her lungs “HELP!!” Two nurses to my left struggled with and fought and cajoled their only printer. They banged on it. They laughed. They couldn’t believe their bad luck. An ancient, shriveled woman brought by ambulance admitted she was there yesterday with terrible gut pain, was told she had a bowel obstruction, but she had left against medical advice. When asked why, she said her husband needed her at home. (My god. A bowel obstruction can kill you, did you know that, ma’am? I’m sure she was informed.) My nurse, who told me I was her first patient of the day, “thank god, so easy,” when I asked her how she handled this level of stress every day, said to me “every morning I tell myself that I can do anything for 12 hours.” Every morning????

This is all to say. Folks? We need to learn to care for ourselves. The doctor and nurse who cared for me were kind, efficient, good medical providers. And probably good people. And I think there is only so much that the kind, efficient, good people of this world can take, and I suspect that “I tell myself I can do anything for 12 hours” is not a sustainable career path. And the level of drama in that ER scared me, in a big-picture way, in a collapse-aware kinda way. We need to learn to (continue to learn to) care for our bodies ourselves, as much as we can.

So it became September this week, the heat broke (it’s still hot, but not as hot), and my mind turned back to the garden. What can I plant there that can become medicine? To care for myself, and my loved ones?

Reminder: I am not a doctor! This is not medical advice. And herbal medicine can interact with medicines you are already taking, so do your own research. But to begin a garden plan, I made a list of medicines I would like to have on hand for fall and winter, and in general, for when going to the doctor or emergency room is not an option. I’m calling it The People’s Medicine Cabinet.

• elderberry syrup

• first sign of flu tea

• warming spices honey (electuary)

• garlic and/or thyme infused honey

• fire cider

• respiratory rescue/remedy

• cough syrup

• sleep aid

• homemade vicks goop

• pain reliever

• burn/scrape salve

• nervous system rescue

• herbs for steaming

• echinacea tincture

• lemon balm tincture

• tonics to support immune, gut, nervous, and lymphatic systems

• medicinal bone broth in the freezer

These are pulled generally from the herbalists who put together the following sources:

Get Radical Boil Roots, published online at the start of COVID, and the authors of which did not include their names but just said they were a group of herbalists who trained at the Blue Otter School of Herbal Medicine with Karyn Sanders and Sarah Holmes (of The Herbal Highway radio show, RIP!)

How To Be A Kitchen Witch, compiled by herbalist Brittany Ducham, author of Radical Remedies

The Winter Herbal Medicine Cabinet, by Jade Alicandro, Milk and Honey Herbs

Medicinal Herbs, A Beginner’s Guide, Rosemary Gladstar

Plants or dried herbs or kitchen cabinet/pantry supplies we need to make all of those medicines are as follows.

To buy at the grocery store and keep stocked:

• apple cider vinegar

• E/V brandy (for tincture making, can also use apple cider vinegar or vegetable glycerin)

• cayenne

• cinnamon

• fennel seeds

• garlic

• ginger (fresh root and powdered)

• honey

• horseradish

• lemons

To buy in dried form from herb sellers (Mountain Rose, Starwest Botanicals, your local herb shop):

• astragalus root

• beeswax

• elderberries

• elderflower

• elecampane

• eucalyptus

• licorice root

• marshmallow root

• milky oats

• mullein

• mushrooms (shiitake, maitake, reishi)

• nettles

• seaweeds

• valerian

To grow starting in late September (I live in zone 9b):

• calendula

• catnip

• chamomile

• dandelion

• echinacea

• tulsi (holy basil)

• garlic

• ginger

• lavender

• lemon balm

• onions

• peppermint

• plantain

• red clover

• rosemary

• sage

• skullcap

• thyme

• yarrow

Option: Buy the following as ready-made tincture from herb sellers if you don’t want to tincture them yourself:

• valerian

• echinacea

• lemon balm

• digestive bitters blend

What would you add to The People’s Medicine Cabinet? What am I missing? I am reminding myself that this kind of supply-tending is a slow walk down a winding path, not a sprint down the highway. No one can do all of this at once. I’m just starting with this list, and a garden plan today. To be continued.

OX, R

• I join the chorus of complaints about the month of August

• Books I have bought and read/put on my to be read pile to distract me from the month of August

• Thoughts on Saved By the Beauty of the World, the new Mary Oliver documentary

• Dolly Parton, sob

August Complaint Department

Hi, is everyone ok? I just read my August 1, Lughnasadh issue and back on August 1, I was all “la la la, summer is over, I love August 1!” And then August happened, that rotted bitch, and it was a sweltering cesspool of labor, sweating while dragging my family from it’s amorphous, summertime blob-life into its school-year shape, coaxing and cajoling and bribing us into early wake-ups and carlines and homework and tryouts and being certain places at certain times. Square pegs, round holes. The garden is burned to a crisp. I gave myself a migraine trying to “work” on it for an hour and ended up in the emergency room a few days later, and saw firsthand the river of despair that is our American healthcare system now: I was a hallway patient in one of the more banal episodes of The Pitt. An off-brand Robby Rabinovitch, M.D., administered the intravenous migraine cocktail that brought me back to life. No more gardening until we break our over 110 degree streak, I guess.

A list of books that I have recently bought, listened to while laboring in August, and/or look at longingly in my to be read pile (a comfort stack)

• Land, Maggie O’Farrell. This book was written for me. Directly to me. In progress.

• Meadowlands, and The Wild Iris, Louise Gluck. No notes, for one of the ultimate queens of the form (poetry)

• The Recovering, and Splinters, Leslie Jamison. A new favorite author.

• What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, and All of Us, The Collected Poems, Raymond Carver. Went down a rabbit hole of what Jamison calls “the old, mythic drunks” in The Recovering. Both of these titles were written after Carver got sober, good for him, and us

• Starling House, Alix E. Harrow. Ear candy, audiobook

• All the Way to the River, Elizabeth Gilbert (lol calm down, Liz)

• Rodales Illustrated Encyclopedia of Herbs (antique mall score, very 80s)

• Dolly All the Time, Annabel Monaghan. TBR.

• Feast on Your Life, Tamar Adler. Brilliant daily poem/essay/thought on food, and life. I love this kind of thing with my morning coffee

A documentary about a beloved poet

Speaking of queens of the form, the new Mary Oliver doc Saved By the Beauty of the World was finally available to stream, and you bet I got right on it, she’s one of my guiding spirits. The documentary was…fine. I was left a little wanting. John Waters was a highlight but you get the sense he was being a little stifled by the process. He was like “oh she was no Earth mother, believe me,” teasing that he had stories to tell, but then we fail to really receive the goods. And the woman Mary moved to Florida with? After Molly Malone Cook died? Could we get the details, please? And as always, we grazed the topic of Mary’s dark and violent childhood home, but didn’t really get into it. And it’s not that I want the gory details of Mary’s trauma but we’re asked to just trust that oh, she had it. Believe me. It was fine. She was a private person, we get it. Maria Shriver’s lips are sealed. Anyway, Mary’s work has always spoken for itself, and it will continue to do so. Queen.

Dolly Parton is an ancestor now

And I am forlorn, I am despondent, a husk of grief and just scrolling my phone to drink up every single tribute and reel and cover song. And on the other hand, I think, you know what, she was a mythic figure while she was alive and she will continue to be that as an ancestor, and that’s okay. I began listening to the canon the next morning, at my desk, working, with Hello, I’m Dolly (1967) and Just Because I’m a Woman (1968) and Golden Streets of Glory (1971). Golden Streets and her other gospel work is among my favorite. I am not a gospel music fan in general, but Dolly’s is different. She is simply not lying when she sings about that stuff. You can hear it. There’s a comfort there, and it shines through.

and another, my favorite forever,

In two days, it will be September. I will be back with plants and magic next time. I love you, keep going.

xo, R

In this issue:

• The Wheel of the Year holiday Lughnasadh, first harvest

• Dried herbs for smoke wands

• Cooling off with marshmallow infusion (it’s so hot)

Hi, all. A quick one today, and late, though Wheel of the Year holiday celebrations don’t have to fall directly on the calendar day. It’s a window, a season. Lughnasadh (August 1) is my favorite one. Lots of witches claim Samhain as their favorite but I love the beginning of August. It feels like a moment of real turning of the Wheel. The end of summer (though it is still so. blazing. hot), feels like such a sigh of relief. Summer is not my best time of year. I’m a water person, a fall and winter person. The relief of fall is coming. It’s not here yet but it’s close.

Lughnasadh (spelled several different ways, also called Lammas) is named for the Celtic god Lugh, and is situated around the time of the first harvests of the spring and summer’s crops. Lugh is often represented as this burly guy with the blazing sun around him, masculinity radiating, wheat and flowers and scythes all around:

When I think of Lughnasadh I prefer something along these lines, but to each her own:

Picture whatever manly god or wheat woman you like. This holiday is about gathering-in, getting organized, starting to plan for winter, getting your community around you, putting down the playthings of summer, working hard and seeing the fruits of your spring labors. The wild, overgrown gardens get cleaned up, prepared for winter. We’re settling down, now. We’re baking the first breads of fall.

Lughnasadh also evokes community, which was everything in the old times, when our ancestors depended on each other for help to gather in the food that would sustain them all winter. I’ve been reading Manchan Magan’s Thirty-Two Words for Field: Lost Words of the Irish Landscape, and he explains that the Gaelic word gort means ‘field’ in County Kerry, Ireland, and within the idea of a gort is “a system of co-operation and sharing of resources that we have now forgotten but may have to return to.” Indeed. He also explains that the “Old Irish word for ploughing is comar,” which means “working in conjunction with other families. The word makes no sense in the singular.” He goes on, “When practising comhar each partner could choose which field was to be worked each day, as long as the work (including moving the animals and equipment) could be done between dawn and dusk.” I am reminded again and again around Wheel of the Year holidays this one most basic truth: we need each other.

From the garden:

So what to do with all of this first harvest bounty? Store it, preserve it, eat it, and give it away, of course. The labor! Worth it. August is the time I make smoke wands for the year. If nothing else in the garden survives the Arizona summer, I can usually count on lots of overgrown herbs that made it through the worst of July’s heat waves. My version of Lugh harvests is to cut a bunch of whatever survived, tie them into wands, and dry them to burn, cleanse, and bless the house all year.

I know we all love our sage wands, but at this point they say white sage has been severely over-harvested and anyway, other herbs beside sage are just as potent and work just as well for clearing and resetting our spaces. As the garden finishes up for the summer, I cut and gather stems of rosemary, sage, thyme, and lavender. I wind bakers twine tightly around the herbs and tie them into bundles. They’re dry in 5-7 days and ready to burn, wafting their cleansing smoke with antibacterial and antiseptic properties.

Herbal Medicine and Kitchen Table Notes:

Finally, an herbal recipe for you! We need something deeply cooling and nourishing after all of this hot work of harvest. Marshmallow is the most deeply cooling herb I know of. In the malvaceae family, mallow’s roots, leaves, and flowers can be used to cool and moisten hot, inflamed tissues. Its herbal properties are many (demulcent, emollient, nutritive, on and on) and it’s used for burns, digestive inflammation, for skin complaints, dry coughs, and for urinary inflammation.

Most commonly prepared as a cold infusion, but can be decocted (hot infusion), eaten, prepared as a tincture or powder.

Mallow Cold Infusion

A cold infusion of marshmallow root is a perfect remedy for the overheated body after working in the garden. Just place 1/2 cup dried marshmallow root (about 1 ounce), or 2/3 cup packed fresh mallow leaves, torn or chopped, into a pint jar. Pour in enough cool water to fill the jar and submerge the herbs completely, stir, cover, and let sit a few hours or overnight in the refrigerator. The longer the herbs infuse, the more viscous and moistening the infusion will be. Strain the mixture, and add mint and lemon. Drink within 24 hours.

From Wild Remedies: How to Forage Healing Foods and Craft Your Own Herbal Medicine, by Rosalee De La Foret & Emily Han.

Ok, time to get to work. Autumn is coming. I love you, keep going.

xo, R

• The condition of existentially overheating

• Chamomile baths

• A dinner from Prune, by Gabrielle Hamilton

I am overheated today. I live in Arizona and it is July, sure, but I’m talking like…existentially. Overcooked, baked to a crisp. Summer is so much. Facts: it’s so hot, it’s so windy, the sun beats and beats and beats down on the sand and the sand is hot, it’s everywhere. I have brought my body to many states this summer. I have driven many miles in rental cars. I have eaten giant crab rolls and lobster and sushi and sandwiches, so many ham and butter on baguette sandwiches. I have drunk gallons of Barry’s tea and bad hotel coffee and good bakery iced americanos and excellent beach prosecco (go to bed, get up, repeat). I sat at the radiating altar of a group of poet women in Maine, I was nearly burned to a crisp by this group of women poets so on fire for their art and so wildly good at arranging their insides into poems, they were almost too bright to see. I was folded into their circle, so warm and welcoming, I almost couldn’t stand it (I would like to keep increasing my tolerance for this particular kind of heat). And guess where next? The beach. To be burned up again, to sit in the sun and bake, to erect shades to sit under, to get another naturally-occuring, heel-smoothing pedicure at the best spa ever (the beach, I’m talking about the beach). I am so lucky, I know, and also today I just feel so hot.

What is a plant that can save me from this overheated mind? I was turning around and around in my kitchen today in a real dog/tail situation, the a/c is blasting in here as usual but the sweat is just dripping down my brain, and my big, neglected, cheerful jar of dried chamomile glowed from the shelf like a little beacon. Right. She is cooling. Chamomile, peach leaf, plantain, marshmallow root. Cooling, quenching, soothing, drenching, got it, got it.

Oh, humble chamomile! Their power is not diminished because we can find them in so many places—grocery stores and roadsides, fields and bodegas, a bag of chamomile tea from a box is no less soothing than a home-grown batch of loose-flower tea you make yourself. Among other actions it’s a relaxing nervine, a mild sedative, and an anti-inflammatory. You can ask for help from chamomile in the form of tea, tincture, essential oil, or infused oil, or what I might do today if I can muster is throw a small muslin bag packed full of chamomile flowers into a cool-ish bath. Sometimes I think the plants can help us so much with our little human existential conditions in the form of bathtime. We’re just little mammals, sometimes we need a soothing bath. There’s a parenting axiom that goes something like “when in doubt, just add water” and it’s like, baby fussy? Put them in a bath with a few emtpy cups, bad mood over. Kid bored? Throw them in any body of water with another kid, problem solved. Etcetera. I forget that it applies to adults as well. Feeling like you will boil over from all the movement, heat, and expectation of summer? Chamomile, bath, calm it down.

In other news, I bought a new cookbook, shocking, I know. Lauded NYC chef Gabrielle Hamilton shuttered her restaurant Prune at the beginning of the pandemic, so I never got to eat there. Hamilton’s tome of restaurant recipes, Prune, is not a new cookbook, it was published in 2014, but I was recently reminded of it and had to have it. What follows is, in my overheated state, what I’m having for dinner right now.

Gabrielle Hamilton's Canned Sardines with Triscuits, Dijon Mustard, and Cornichons 

1 can sardines in oil 
1 dollop Dijon mustard 
small handful cornichons 
small handful Triscuit crackers
1 parsley branch 

(I will be omitting the parsley  branch.) Hamilton says "Stack the sardines on the plate the same way they looked in the can-- more or less. Don't crisscross or zigzag or otherwise make 'restauranty.'" (Done.)

Finally, the coolest most soothing picture I could find on my phone:

I will be back after the beach (oh, the beach!) Stay cool. oxoxo, R

Every summer when I was a kid my little sister and I visited my Dad’s family, our grandparents, aunts and uncles, cousins, and other extended family in Eastern Kentucky. Their homes are deep in true Appalachia, the area is really in the mountains. After hours of sitting listening to the adults I would beg my Dad to take us for a walk into the woods, and eventually he would relent and off we would trudge, waving at my grandparents as we went, leaving them happily in their lawn chairs under the sprawling willow tree. The grownups-talking-drinking-iced-tea-tree. We climbed the steep dirt road behind my grandparents’ house, through the rusty cattle gate, making sure to close it again behind us.

The cattle standing around up there on that hill at the edge of the forest were sleepy, hot, tails swishing the flies. They swung their massive heads and looked around at us with lazy curiosity, my Dad chatting away, just comfortable on this green Earth, smoking like a chimney and always talking, tromping along the trail. Dad told us the names of the trees, grasses, birds. We passed the little country cemetery tucked up there, and we never stopped in those days because at that time, no one we knew was in there. Today I go there with my arms full of flowers because it is full of my family, including Dad. (Sob.)

We were ambling and just walking to walk but also we were headed to a specific place, hidden deep in the woods, my favorite thing, a magical spot — one massive wild blackberry bramble. We brought a bucket. We would pick and eat them as we picked, but only the biggest, shining ones. Every time, my arms would get scratched and hung on the thorns — they were relentless, those thorns, and I didn’t care. I and that bramble had an understanding: I gave a few drops of Appalachian family girlhood blood and that bramble gave up their berries in return. It was fair. And the scratches were a badge of honor, of course. I climbed halfway into that massive bush to get to the best fruit and I had the crisscrosses up my arms to show for it. It was something I could do, it was a conversation I was having with a living being. The bramble thorns were the point.

We would bring the bucket of blackberries back down the hill to my grandmother, and she would wash them in the sink and give us bowls of blackberries and cream. That’s it. Just blackberries and heavy cream. Just summer.

I read Eating at Home by Trinity Mouzon Wofford a few weeks ago, cover to cover. Trinity’s writing is calm, her approach is unfussy, and encourages a deep, nourishing relationship with food. She includes a recipe for skillet jam that I really appreciate. If I was back on that Kentucky hill, I would do a blackberry skillet jam in June.

Skillet Jam
by Trinity Mouzon Wofford 

2/3 cup cane sugar 
2-3 tbsp grated citrus zest 
6 cup fresh or frozen berries, or chopped very ripe stone fruit 
1/4 cup fresh citrus juice (lemon, grapefruit, orange)
1/2 tsp sea salt 

Basically...you cook all of this together over medium-low heat, in a skillet! Until jammy. Keep an eye on it, stir often. Don't let it burn. 

Blackberries have medicine beyond the pleasures of hill walks and jam, of course. Blackberry and raspberry plants are high in tannins, which makes them good for use as astringents. Astringents tone tissues. A tea of blackberry or raspberry leaf can be taken to reduced inflammation in the mouth and gums, to tone sinus tissues during allergy season and lessen a leaky nose faucet, and as a mild treatment for (noninfectious) diarrhea.

The Summer Solstice, (called Litha on the Wheel of the Year calendar), is on June 21. Bonfire, anyone? Every year I am stunned that the longest day of year feels so early in the summer— after that day, the days begin to get shorter again. We already begin to tip toward the dark, on June 21! It seems to go so fast. Then the June full moon is on June 29. The Old Farmer’s Almanac (love, forever) reminds me that this one is the Strawberry Moon: “This “Strawberry Moon” name has been used by Native American Algonquian tribes that live in the northeastern United States as well as the Ojibwe, Dakota, and Lakota peoples to mark the ripening of “June-bearing” strawberries that are ready to be gathered. The Haida term Berries Ripen Moon reflects this as well. As flowers bloom and early fruit ripens, June is a time of great abundance for many.” Indeed.

Up next: more medicinal offerings for this virtual community farm stand.

I’m back!

Well, Beltane came and went. No matter. I am here now, and I stepped over the threshold of summer with my kids last week, and we are here now. Deep in no-school times, wait, what-day-is-it times, bedtimes are negotiable times, every evening the pool splashing and yelling commences times. I spent some time musing on the difference between a threshold and a portal recently—the distinction isn’t huge, but notable. Threshold is a change point, or starting point. Portal is connector. Between one world and the next. The difference is small, but meaningful. I feel like the moment between school year and summer is both. So much about the day to day changes, the rhythms, the conversations, the problems big and small, all change their tenor in summer. Change point. And the worlds are two different worlds. We step through the portal of the last day of school. Connector.

This spring I have been growing my garden. I have been growing red amaranth, and golden amaranth, a single sunflower though my hopes were much higher (birds got my seeds, I think, and I can live with that), corn, tulsi, so much volunteer tulsi throughout my garden, Italian basil, two tomatoes, some white globe flowers that I forget the name of, a hatch chili pepper, three Kentucky wonder bean plants, and some other herbs that I forget, and flowers, they’re being very slow to grow. Herbs take forever from seed. In my herb box is lavender, oregano, lemon balm, sage, parsley, a fennel that insists on existing, and I don’t know what else. And my citrus tree, calamondin, that seems to thrive, and I am so proud of it. And grandmother rosemary, of course. She watches over everything. Saturdays are for pruning everything, to encourage all to grow and thrive. You have to cut and prune in order for things to thrive. You have to cut in order for everything to breathe.

So far this year I have read the following books: Bread of Angels, Patti Smith, Art Work, Sally Mann, Long Island Compromise, Taffy Brodesser-Akner, Devotion, Patti Smith, The Great Alone, Kristin Hannah, The Salt Stones, Helen Whybrow, M Train, Patti Smith, The Practice of Attention, Cody Cook Parrott, The Outsiders, SE Hinton, Whidbey, T Kira Madden, London Falling, Patrick Radden Keefe, Yesteryear, Caro Claire Burke, Eating at Home, Trinity Mouzon Wofford, The Everlasting, Alix E. Harrow. One of my wishes for 2026 was to become A Reader again. I wish that the endeavor did not include a count or tally but it’s how I’m keeping track right now. Am I doing what I set out to do? I think so. I mostly do it by listening to the audiobook version of these while I’m doing my mom/spouse/householder labor. Cooking, dishes, laundry? Driving the kids around? Audiobook. It means I have fallen behind on my podcasts at times but everything is a negotiation.

I could go on and on about the Everlasting by Alix E. Harrow. You know how sometimes you’re not sure if the book is that good or if it was just what you needed at that particular moment in time and space? Well, I think it is both, I think it is that good, and it was also just what I needed. I think the project of returning to a state of being that is A Reader offers this gift. If you give works of art a chance sometimes you fall into medicine that you needed right when you needed it. The writing is so beautiful, the story fantastical and romantic and stressful in just the perfect amount. And there’s time travel, and let me tell you that this is the one and only and probably will ever be the one and only time travel novel that I will ever love. Time travel is not my thing. So this rave review is saying a lot. One line has not left me since I finished the book: “Dizzily, sickly, in a long string of metaphors, I saw everything we could make of love: chains, debts, cages, circles. And, too, I saw everything it could make of us: tragedies, traitors, madmen, cowards.” It seems throwaway but feels profound (a magic trick of good writers). Chains, debts, cages, circles. Indeed. The wheel turns, I am still here.

So far this year I have returned to reading and also writing—poetry. I was a secret teenage poet and my return as a—whatever this is, gestures to sagging face, greying hair—in these catastrophic times has been life-sustaining. I became a member of the Casual Union of Working Poets, hosted by poet Holly Wren Spaudling, we meet virtually twice a month and it has rearranged my brain in the best way. Dropping in to the world of poetry and the craft of writing it at a regular cadence throughout the months is magic.

I was so inspired this week by the Numinous Podcast episode 318 with Marianne Unger, author of the forthcoming book Farmstand News: Letters to the Neighborhood, published by Ninth House Press. “It's about neighbourliness, baking, gardening, place-making, heritage and chosen family, the gift economy, and turning capitalist colonialism on its head. And most of all, it's about love.” Sign me up. That’s Hedge Tender people right there.

Coming up next: medicinal offerings at this virtual farm stand

• Thoughts on Eostre, Ostara, and the transformation of it all

• altars to good work

• Gut healing tea

• Cody Cook Parrot wrote a new book for us!

Hi!

They say this moment on the Wheel of the Year, Ostara, is not an ancient ritual, holiday, or goddess, it’s from 20th century Wicca. However, there is a connection to a germanic/Anglo-Saxon goddess named Eostre, who 8th Century monk Bede wrote represented Easter, renewal of life, fertility, and the return of light after long winters.

The news is bad. Here in the U.S., March 2026, things feel dark, do they not? But I can feel our collective spring unfurling. The people are, despite all efforts to keep us asleep, waking up. Marking the spring equinox (Friday, March 26), the moment that there is an equal amount of light and dark, with some altar decorations and flowers and getting into the garden and moving some dirt around and feeling the sun on our faces seems right. Making some spring medicine to heal and get things moving seems timely. I can’t talk details about fascism and war on the verge of spring equinox. As usual, I know lots of things but I also feel like I know zero actual things, only this — head down, dig in the dirt, feel the sun, read poetry, walk it out, drink water, and remember that even in war there are new eggs, daffodils drooping their cheerful heads in the breeze, rabbits, nettles, strawberries.

I mean to say that I can feel a spirit of industry in the Spring. That’s little-i industry: doing the work with our hands of sweeping out the cobwebs, clearing winter’s debris, making space for the new, or the returning, life. Change the sheets, clear the dead leaves, sweep the gutters, do good work. On my altar today I plan to give some gifts to the ancestors in that spirit — those old ones who never stopped working, planting, harvesting, sweeping, digging, always moving forward to carve out a spot for themselves. And thereby for us.

Whether or not Eostre or Ostara or bunnies or eggs or Spring appeals to you, at it’s core this is a season of transformation. Winter is giving way, going back to sleep. Spring is arriving. Carmen Spagnola implores us in The Spirited Kitchen: “Take a look outside your window. What are the signs that herald spring where you are? … Worship the sacred in your local little brown birds, swelling waterways, or emerging plants. Ask the wind to inspire the right deity to come to you, bringing with them hope and renewal.”

Herbal Medicine and Kitchen Table Notes

Ok I don’t know about you all but speaking of war, fascism, and sweeping out the stagnant and cruddy, my guts are an absolute mess these days. Do I need more Cadbury Mini Eggs? No. (But they’re so good, ugh!)

I plan to start myself on a gut-heal regimen this week. This tea is my go-to!

Gut-Healing Tea 
from Body Into Balance: An Herbal Guide to Holistic Self-Care, Maria Noel Groves 

1 teaspoon marshmallow root
1 teaspoon plantain
1/2 teaspoon cinnamon chips or 1 cinnamon stick 
1/2 teaspoon licorice root 
1/2 teaspoon rose petals 
3 cloves 
1 star anise (optional) 
pinch of nutmeg (optional) 

Combine the herbs in a small pot, add 2 cups of water, bring to a boil, then reduce heat and let simmer, covered, for 20 minutes. Remove from heat and let sit overnight. Strain. Reheat as desired before serving. Alternatively, if you don't want to wait overnight, you can prepare the tea as a basic decoction or, though weaker in action, an infusion (steep for 60 minutes or longer, preferably in an insulated thermos). 

A Poem for Today

Spring 
by Mary Oliver, from House of Light 

Somewhere
   a black bear 
       has just risen from sleep 
            and is staring 

Down the mountain. 
     All night 
          in the brisk and shallow restlessness 
               of early spring 

I think of her, 
     her four black fists
          flicking the gravel,
               her tongue 

like a red fire 
     touching the grass, 
          the cold water. 
               There is only one question; 

how to love this world. 
     I think of her 
          rising 
               like a black and leafy ledge 

to sharpen her claws against 
     the silence 
          of the trees. 
                Whatever else 

my life is 
     with its poems 
          and its music 
                and its glass cities, 

it is also this dazzling darkness
     coming 
          down the mountain, 
                 breathing and tasting; 

all day I think of her ---
     her white teeth, 
          her wordlessness, 
               her perfect love. 

Cozy Corner

A new book from Cody!

From Cody’s website, codycookparrott.com: Cody Cook Parrott is “a writer, artist, and movement practitioner who builds simple structures that help artists make work. Their focus is attention, creative ecosystems, and research — so your practice becomes a scaffolding to grow steadily — online and off.”

Last September, Cody and I together walked through their offering named Wind Signal— a whole week of daily meetings, one on one, to create a project that needed creating. They helped me vision, focus, and take the practical steps that then became this newsletter. Not just a newsletter, was born, though— a whole creative life opened up that I didn’t realize existed. Cody is the most gentle, funny, and supportive midwife for our creative babies. They want to help us make the stuff! The world needs our art now.

To help us even more to make our art, Cody’s new book The Practice of Attention is published THIS WEEK! By St. Martin’s Essentials. I’ve read it, and it is truly such a lovely resource. Cody reminds us that our attention is devotion, a sacred resource that we have been led in recent years to give away for free to people and business that may not align with our values. No judgment, but this is our reminder that we have agency in the process of reclaiming it. Simple steps and prompts to get us there fill this book, and Cody’s gentle humor and guidance is a balm for these wild times.

Pub day is March 17! Pre-order from Cody’s website or from anywhere you get your books.

Up Next

Beltane is May 1, and oh, baby, we will be in it then, summer will be calling our names. I may pop in before then, I think I miss writing to you more often than only on the Wheel holidays. We shall see where the wind blows this scattered brain of mine!

Sources

Spagnola, Carmen. The Spirited Kitchen. Recipes and Rituals for the Wheel of the Year. Countryman Press, 2022.

Groves, Maria Noel. Body Into Balance. An Herbal Guide to Holistic Self-Care. Storey Publishing, 2016.

Oliver, Mary. Devotions. Penguin Press, 2017.

See you soon! xo, R

• Thoughts on Brigid, the goddess of Imbolc

• Making ancestral bread for a hearth-goddess

• Beautiful films, an ancient but timely poem, and looking ahead into Spring!

Hi.

Imbolc is here on Sunday, February 1, marking the halfway point between the Winter Solstice and the Spring Equinox. The Wheel turns. It feels like it’s on fire, doesn’t it? A fiery wheel. Appropriate for these wild times, and for our lady of the forge, the Celtic goddess Brigit, also spelled Brigid, or also sometimes shortened to Bride.

The following relies heavily on The Spirited Kitchen by Carmen Spagnola, who reminds us that the word imbolc is an old Irish term that refers to pregnant ewes, and also means “in the belly.” Spring is in the belly of winter, waiting to be born. It is potential, it is a feeling of not quite there and still cooking, it is still in the dark but wait! there’s a spark of light.

Bringing that spark of light to the dark, cold season is the Celtic goddess Brigid, deeply enmeshed with his moment on the Wheel of the Year. Spagnola states that Brigid is “primarily connected with the great trifecta of Gaelic arts: poetry, smithing, and healing. Brigid is strongly associated with the hearth fire, fertility, midwifery, and nurturance.” She is nurturing, but also fierce. She tends the kitchen fire and the FIRE fire.

When the Christian church overlaid the Celtic gods and goddesses with saint myths, the church retold her story, and the newly-named St. Brigid of Kildare was said to be “born a pagan with the gift of healing and so became a kind of druidic vestal virgin, devoted to maintaining an eternal flame,” who then put out her own flame upon meeting St. Patrick, converted to Christianity, and lit a new flame consecrated to Christ. (All respect to all humans devoted at any level to organized religion but these retooling of the old Celtic god and goddess myths are really so…wow). An enduring symbol of the devotion and strength of St. Brigid, the Brigid’s cross, made of wheat straw or rushes, survives to this day. Likewise, in the Scottish Hebrides in the 19th century, a doll made of rushes or wheat straw and decorated with flowers, cloth, beads, and other ephemera came to represent Brigid, and adorns altars across the globe at this holiday. Examples of Brigid’s crosses and a simple Bridey doll are here:

Brigid’s association with fire continued after she became St. Brigit. In Kindling the Celtic Spirit, Mara Freeman shares a seventh century hymn to St. Brigit:

Bright, excellent woman, 
Flame golden, sparkling, 
May she bear us to the eternal kingdom, 
She the sun, fiery, radiant! 

Freeman writes that the name Brigit “stemmed from breo-aigit, ‘fiery arrow,’ a fitting name for a goddess of the hearth, the forge, and the flame that burns within the hearts of poets.” Particularly sacred in Ireland and Scotland, Brigit is invoked when a hearth fire is kindled, by mothers in childbirth, and whenever protection is needed.

Brigid is also the goddess of wells and springs and is known as a “triple goddess”…we’ll save those aspects of her for next time. What a figure she is. Let’s build an altar to Brigid, to the first spark of spring, to hope, to protection for all of us!

My Imbolc altar to Brigid this year will invoke her spark of fire in the darkness, her healing power, her strength and courage at the forge. It will include a picture of Brigid, a wheat straw Brigid’s cross, a woven cloth with a Brigid’s cross printed on it, green and healing medicine things, which is what is growing my garden right now: chamomile, calendula, rosemary, lavender. Candles, for the fire! Water, for the ancestors and to honor her sacred springs. Frankincense, for the air, for the smoke, for the cleansing properties. May she appreciate our altar offerings and bring us strength and fierce, fiery courage. We need it right now! I will be late building my altar this weekend but I found a few really cool ones online to share:

Herbal Medicine and Kitchen Table Notes

If you’re feeling ambitious, a little baking in the hearth fire (kitchen, oven, stove!) is in order, and a Rosemary Oat Bannock from Gather Victoria will be perfect. A bannock is a quick bread, meaning it uses baking powder (as opposed to baking soda or yeast) as its leavening agent. The Celts used oats as the base, and added butter and herbs, or kept it plain. I can see how these hearth-baked breads became the cast-iron skillet cornbreads of my Scottish diaspora/Appalachian ancestors. Ancestral food is so. cool. These come together quick and there’s something magical about it. Leave out the rosemary if you like, it’s just as good plain, warmed up with butter and salt.

Rosemary Oat Bannock by Danielle Proham Olson, gathervictoria.com

A Poem for Today

In this moment in January 2026 America I can’t stop thinking about this translation of Sappho by Mary Barnard:

82. Rich as you are 

Death will finish 
you: afterwards no 
one will remember 

or want you: you 
had no share in 
the Pierian roses 

You will flitter 
invisible among 
the indistinct dead
in Hell's place 
darting fitfully 

Cozy Corner

• I am a casual Oscars-head, I love movies and even though we know it’s all a bullshit popularity contest, I love Hollywood awards season and all the drama and fashion and gossip around it. I watched Best Picture nominee Train Dreams on Netflix this week, and WOW. What a beautiful film. Devastating, in the best way.

• I also loved Sinners so much I watched it twice, which I almost never do. It’s multiple, multiple Oscar noms is historic and so deserved. I caught a little crush on director Ryan Coogler after his episode of Good Hang with Amy Poehler. (He “got involved with” mixing soda flavors at the movies as a kid, lol)

• Beloved poet Maggie Smith gave heart this week, a pep talk for artists feeling wobbly about making their art in such grim times. It was so helpful.

  For Dear Life with Maggie Smith

  Pep Talk

  Hi, Friend…

  Read more

  7 months ago · 307 likes · 17 comments · Maggie Smith

Up Next

I am going to slow the cadence of Hedge Tender a bit and will not be back here until the next Wheel holiday, Ostara. We’ll have some deep Spring thoughts and altar building then! Marking the Wheel of the Year holidays will be it for now, as I am having a burst of energy toward other creative projects and only have time for so much. The planet Neptune is now in the sign of Aries for anyone who keeps up with that kind of thing, Aries is my rising sign, and so it’s off to the races for several projects and I’m literally just trying to keep up. What a problem to have, I’m not complaining. The other option is go to bed and get under the covers until the world ends, and we’re not doing that. Thank you for being on this journey with me, don’t stop making medicine and reading poetry while I’m gone!

Sources

Barnard, Mary. Sappho: A New Translation. University of California Press, 1958.

Freeman, Mara. Kindling the Celtic Spirit: Ancient Traditions To Illumine Your Life Throughout the Seasons. Harper One, 2001.

Spagnola, Carmen. The Spirited Kitchen: Recipes and Rituals for the Wheel of the Year. Countryman Press, 2022.

See you March 15, the Sunday before Ostara (Spring Equinox)! xo, R

Hi.

In January 2026, sitting in America, with an iphone and a brain and a heart, I got no fresh takes this morning. Nothing profound from your friendly neighborhood gen x white lady hedge witch. As Nora put it this morning, “You don’t need another white woman spiraling into your inbox.” Agree. I feel I am just in information gather and disseminate mode. I attended a zoom training on how to do ICE watch this week. I forwarded the slides to my loved ones. I learned what the rotted-toe, rag-tag, hodge-podge of different federal agents terrorizing our communities commonly wear and drive. I shared that. I restacked. I screenshotted and texted. I tried to keep breathing. I watched a whole ass movie. I did retail therapy at my local independent bookstore and held my new stack of poetry volumes close to me all day. I come to you this morning to continue the dissemination. Grab your coffee, settle in, let’s go:

Nora McInerny: “I’m not telling you that everything is going to be okay because that is statistically inaccurate and spiritually irresponsible. But the practice of finding the okay things is not silly, it is survival.”

Erin Shetron met her warrior queen, and we all need our warrior queens right now.

Anne Helen Petersen rounded up several very important and moving things about the murder of Alex Pretti by federal agents yesterday in Minneapolis, including “M. Gessen on entering the logic of state terror: ‘If we don’t talk back, if we alter our routes to avoid protests, if we are lucky enough to be white, straight, natural-born Americans — or, if we are not, but we lie low, stay quiet — we will be safe. Conversely, we can choose to speak up, to go to protests, to take a risk. Either way, we tell ourselves, if we can predict the consequences, we have agency. But that’s not how state terror works.’”

Leona Waller on what we (I would add those of us who are living outside of Minnesota, Minnesotans are doing the REAL heavy lifting for the rest of us right now) need to do, NOW. PICK THREE.

Margaret Killjoy went to Minneapolis to report on what's happening, and their report was HEARTENING and remains so, even after yesterday. “I’ve been involved in protest movements for 24 years now (maybe it’s cheesy, but I picked a specific protest as my starting point) and I’ve never seen a population so united, and it’s not even close. The entire city, it seems like, is rising up against the kidnappers.”

The Minneapolis general strike on Friday was mesmerizing and also gave heart. We can do this. We can do this. Local restaurants were closed but fed protestors. Samosas for neighbors putting their bodies on the line for democracy, no big deal. (sobs)

Finally, next Sunday, February 1, is a Wheel of the Year holiday. I welcome it because 1) as someone else on the internet said this week, it has been January for 100 years, and 2) Imbolc is one of my favorites. It falls on St. Brigid’s day, and if you peel back the Christianity overlay there you’ll find the Celtic goddess Brigid (Brigit, Bride), who rules…everything? She’s a Big One. A real one. We’ll build an altar to her and celebrate the Cailleach, the Old Woman of Winter, giving over to the Fair Woman of February next week. We will add elements that fortify and sustain Minnesotans and everyone else. Gather your altar stuff!

See you next week! xo, R

• Thoughts on witnessing…all of this *gestures wildly*

• Dandelion, and the ability to accumulate toxins and return them to the Earth in a less toxic state

• Dandelion bitters medicine

• Minneapolis, ACLU, what can we do

  Hedge Tender is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Hi.

What a phrase, bearing witness. The labor of it. The weight. What does it mean to live a life (partner, work, feed ourselves, raise children, tend our creative practices, care for our neighbors, do what we can for others) while at the same time witnessing one of the larger containers of that individual and collective life break apart? What does it mean to witness your home culture and leadership and society break into a million pieces and fall down all around you? What if we have no container? Will we just drift off into space?

It feels profound to bear witness to this breakdown of our big-picture structures, the scaffolding, the institutions, the leadership. I understand that this is not new, that the breakdown has been slowly coming forever, and now it is coming very fast, all at once. I am also under no illusions that this place was ever perfect, I know it was (is) actually a perfect hell for entire groups and populations and tribes (literal and figurative) since white people first set foot here. Also, it IS. It exists. It is a place, and a group of people(s), ideas, cultures, darkness and light and hope and brilliance and ignorance and art and vile fuckery. All at once.

When something that IS ceases to be, or changes forms so completely it becomes unrecognizable to its former self, and you’re standing there, it is a moment. A thing to witness. What does it to do us, to witness it? How does it change us? Our DNA? How did it change the DNA of the person(s) who bore witness and recorded the murder of Nicole Good in Minneapolis last week? If you stood there and witnessed that event in person, phone up, recording, and heard her murderer call her a fucking bitch after murdering her, with the bright winter Minnesota sun shining all around and snow on the ground and tires crunching, how are your molecules rearranged? And how are we, those of us who weren’t there, changed by witnessing the video(s)?

Just as we are changed by these smaller events within the larger breakdown, whether or not our democracy survives this era, this place will never be the same. For better or worse, it is happening now, with all of us watching. All of the molecules are rearranged as we are witnessing.

The plant who came to me this week while we’ve been witnessing was the ever-present, ever-returning, dandelion. Dandelion is a tough motherfucker who keeps. Comin. Back. Dandelion has quite literally seen it all. You can’t ask for a better ally in witnessing the horrors (and surviving them) than dandelion.

Dandelion is, to get scientific about it, a dynamic accumulator, or hyperaccumulator. Each plant has a very long taproot that goes way down into the soil, and can absorb minerals and very high concentrations of metals, more than other plants and closely related species. They can absorb even toxic levels of heavy metals and then convert that toxic stuff into energy, storing it in their leaves and roots in a less toxic state—and then restoring good minerals to the soil. I feel like a dynamic accumulator of our collective, crumbling field. Witnessing, absorbing the shock and grief. Will we return the shock and grief in a less toxic state to this place? Maybe. I hope so.

“But like all good rebels, the dandelions are irrepressible.” -Guido Mase, herbalist and author of DIY Bitters: Reviving the Forgotten Flavor.

Herbal Medicine and Kitchen Table Notes

Dandelion, taraxacum officinale, is a cooling, drying, bitter plant that we can literally find anywhere there are humans. It wants to be with us. It seems it wants to digest our toxic shit and make it better. What a guy!

We can use the leaves and roots of the dandelion plant for so many purposes: the leaves can be eaten or cooked down with other dark, leafy greens (collards, etc) or can be made into a tincture or tea for diuretic, alterative (blood cleansing), nutritive, or digestive stimulation use. The roots can be cooked down or steeped for alterative, nutritive, and cholagogue (stimulating bile production) purposes.

Dandelion is a common ingredient in an herbal preparation known as “digestive bitters.” Bitters “turn on” your digestive tract, and promote peristalsis (motion of the tract), saliva production, and enzyme production and excretion. Bitters are easy to make and taking a dropperful/spoonful before or after meals helps things…move. If you know what I mean. And maybe a dropperful every day will helps us dynamically accumulate this grief with courage, and resilience.

Dandelion Digestive Bitters

2 parts dandelion root
1 parts fennel seed
1 part lemon balm or chamomile 
1/2 part ginger 
1/2 part dried citrus peel 
vodka, brandy, or glycerite if you're alcohol-free
maple syrup or honey

Combine the herbs and loosely pack enough of them into a glass jar to fill it about 3/4 full. Cover with a mix of 75% vodka, brandy, or glycerite (vegetable glycerin) and 25% maple syrup or honey. Shake to combine. Let sit on the counter for 2-4 weeks, shaking every day or two. Strain out the herbs and pour into a clean mason jar or bottle with dropper. Take one teaspoon or one dropperful before or after meals. 

A Poem for Today

Lemon and Cedar

by Melissa Stein

What is so pure as grief? A wreck
set sail just to be wrecked again.
To lose what’s lost–it’s all born lost
and we just fetch it for a little while,
a dandelion span, a quarter-note.
Each day an envelope gummed shut
with honey and mud. Foolish
to think you can build a house
from suffering. Even the hinges will be
bitter. There will be no books
in that house, only transfusions.
And all the lemon and cedar
in the world won't rid the walls
of that hospital smell.

Cozy Corner

• On the January 14th episode of the podcast How to Survive the End of the World, sisters Adrienne Marie Brown and Autumn Brown talk the conditions on the ground in Minneapolis and surviving living in a city under siege. Autumn Brown is a single mom to three kids in that city. Parenting in these times is not for the faint of heart.

• This week I’m upping my monthly donation to the American Civil Liberties Union. Also researching local orgs working to protect folks vulnerable to ICE raids in my city. Stocking community fridges continues to be a go-to, as vulnerable people may avoid more formal food banks and shelters for fear that those places are ICE targets.

• Anne Helen Peterson (Culture Study) is highlighting “Neighbors Helping Neighbors” today, a South Minneapolis organization: “Across South Minneapolis and beyond, individuals and families are facing sudden detention, separation, and displacement due to ICE enforcement. These moments create immediate financial crises: rent goes unpaid, fridges go empty, and legal costs pile up overnight.” Donate here.

• Take care, everybody. It’s Girl Scout cookie season so I say go nuts

  

Up Next

Through the Hedge! Thoughts and recs that swirl around this week!

Sources

Groves, Maria Noel. Body into Balance: An Herbal Guide to Holistic Self-Care. Storey Publishing, 2016.

De La Foret, Rosalee. Alchemy of Herbs: Transform Everyday Ingredients Into Foods & Remedies That Heal. Hay House, Inc., 2017.

See you next week! xo, R

I haven’t watched the hot hockey show so I don’t have anything to add to the discourse this week. Ha! Doesn’t it seem like that’s the case? If you haven’t watched it you’re the last person on Earth and you also must hate love and hope. (I don’t! I love those things!)

Just kidding, it’s not about Heated Rivalry, I’m just taking a moment this week, I’ll be back next week to nerd out on deep thoughts, herbal medicine, seasonal magic, and poetry. Probably not about hockey.

See you next week! xo, R

In this issue you will find:

• A recipe for lighting a magic ass fire

• A hopeful and ambitious reading list for 2026

• An excerpt of a poem to break your heart

Hi.

Oh, it has been all resolutions and anti-resolutions and apathy around resolutions and earnest intentions this week, hasn’t it? Recaps and roundups. Lists, lists, lists. The new year discourse swirls around and around like a dog chasing it’s own tail until it doesn’t, until we all get bored and move on to the next thing. Meanwhile, the volume on the United States bullshit boombox got cranked up to 11 yesterday. Pardon me, but what the ever loving fuck.

I want a thousand things for this year and here are a few: in 2026 I want to go deeper. I want to connect, swim down into the dark and look back up and see the sparkling sunlight glittering through. I want to float in the dark river and see all of the stars, all of them. I want planets and plants, spells and altar work, hearthwork and ancestor veneration and folk medicine. Goddesses and poetry. Radical magic practices and radical community and connection to people who also think that getting more weird is the way forward. Who agree that going deeper into the velvet dark and brambly hedge is the only way through. (Oh and reading actual books like a maniac. Like I used to. More on that below.) Here in the hedge we observe the holidays on the Wheel of the Year, we make herbal medicine, we read poetry, we have fun. But I want more.

The thing is that in order to really go deeper we have to do the work. With our bodies. And hands. And voices. As much as I want to just sit and read and think and believe it into being, real transformative magic requires action. Movement. Somatic involvement. I’m not talking hot yoga and hiking to the top of a mountain kind of somatic involvement. I’m talking using our actual hands to build a little in-real-life altar and then using those hands to light a real candle kind of somatic involvement. Armchair witch no more! I need a fire lit under my ass. No one is going to light it for me.

To that end, I offer us all three simple tools to light the magic ass fire. A basic, customizable recipe to practice with our actual hands and bodies, to welcome this year of practicing, diving deeper, getting more weird.

Recipe to Light the Magic Fire for 2026

1. The Tea (kindling)

   Drinking a hot cup of something that came from the Earth creates a tether between us and the land. It is, as they say, grounding. A particularly magical blend for me is equal parts of nettle, tulsi (also called holy basil), and peppermint. Use what you have, if it’s a Traditional Medicinals bag of Cold Care, drink that.

2. The Altar (logs)

   Find a spot in your home where you can leave a hanky-sized piece of fabric with some stuff on top of it for a little while. Find a hanky-sized piece of fabric. Bonus points if it’s special in some way. Beloved dead grandma’s actual hanky? Perfect. Crocheted pot holder from your oldest friend? Put it to work. Throw it down there. Next, get something that represents each of the Big Four elements, that is: fire, Earth, water, air. So candle (fire), cup of…water (you got it), dish of garden dirt OR a couple of those crystals your buddy gave you last year (Earth), and stick of incense (air). And a lighter to light said incense. (Air can be a little tricky but easy swaps for incense are a pen, knife, or feather.)

3. The Spell (spark)

   I have found this part to always be a little intimidating or embarrassing (why? no one is watching) but it gets easier with practice. Which we are going to do. A spell does not have to be complicated. A spell is just an intention + words + action. That’s it. So decide on what you want, in this case, to light a fire under my ass to consistently do the work of magic (intention), write it out (words), and then light the candle, read the words, and burn the paper (action). Safely! Practice fire safety, people. Burn your paper over the sink.

   *An extra level-up is to first ask for help with realizing the intention, or speak an invocation. That is, invoking someone or something or some force or person or entity and asking them to help you accomplish what you’re trying to do. I do this, but you don’t have to. If you ask for help you gotta offer something in return, that is, leave something that person, entity, etc might like on the altar. It’s good practice.

Okay. Drink the tea, make a little altar, ask for help (or don’t), set an intention, write it down, say it out loud, burn the paper. PEOPLE WE ARE MAKING MAGIC NOW.

COME ON, 2026. DO YOUR WORST.

A Reading List for 2026

Another very magical thing I know to do to go deeper is read books. I won’t go into it as I suspect all readers of this newsletter are the same but I used to be A Big Reader. Guess what happened? I had kids (amazing and wonderful but man what a time and attention suck), and I got an iphone (a scourge). A Big Reader I ceased to be. I mean I have still read books (mainly on the Kindle app on my phone, in the dark, waiting for a baby/kid to sleep or praying a baby/kid does not wake up, or listened to books in audiobook form) but My Reading Life has really just limped along, anemic and faltering, for probably the past 10 years. I am determined, in 2026, to return. I am a firm believer that purchased e-books, e-books from the library, Kindle apps on phones, audiobooks, real books, all count as reading. I am mainly trying to read more physical books because I want my kids to see me reading physical books, but again, it all counts. I have chosen 11 I really want to read this year that are outside my normal poetry and non-fiction stuff I have going all the time. This seems ambitious, but let’s see how it goes.

0. I finished Bread of Angels by Patti Smith right at the New Year. Counts.

1. Long Island Compromise by Taffy Brodesser-Ankner. Currently reading softcover.

2. Art Work by Sally Mann. Currently audiobooking.

3. The Salt Stones by Helen Whybrow.

4. Wreck by Catherine Newman.

5. Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte.

6. Something by Leigh Bardugo. Shadow and Bone?

7. A Psalm for the Wild-Built by Becky Chambers.

8. Pachinko by Min Jin Lee.

9. The Great Alone by Kristin Hannah.

10. Adult Braces by Lindy West.

11. The Practice of Attention by Cody Cook Parrott.

A Poem for Today

From To Begin With, The Sweet Grass

by Mary Oliver

3. 
The witchery of living! 
is my whole conversation 
with you, my darlings. 
All I can tell you is what I know. 

Look, and look again. 
This world is not just a little thrill for the eyes. 

It's more than bones. 
It's more than the delicate wrist with its personal pulse. 
It's more than the beating of the single heart. 
It's praising. 
It's giving until the giving feels like receiving. 
You have a life--just imagine that! 
You have this day, and maybe another, and maybe 
     still another.

See you next week! xo, Robin

Hi.

Welcome to Through the Hedge! Every other week we will deliver the following, that is, a shorter, round-up style letter with links and recommendations for you that I have been thinking about, enjoying, and gathering this week. Next week we will return to regular longer-form writing and herbal medicine.

We did it! We did Christmas. Again. In spite of it all. Or because of it all. I feel like the owl above, exactly. Shocked, fried, exhausted. I feel like Lamorne Morris in the Christmas Chronicles: “and the REINDEER just FLEW AWAY. Who’s crazy now! I QUIT!!”

• Doing a little thinking on who we’ve lost from movies and TV this year. This is TCM Remembers 2025. Man, we lost some Big Ones. I forgot about Val.

• I love Culture Study with Anne Helen Petersen and am very much looking forward to a long walk and the newest episode of the Culture Study podcast, which Anne Helen describes as: “While everyone else is listing their favorite movies and albums and television shows in their end-of-year wrap-ups, Melody and I opted to make up random (but wonderful) categories and force the other person to come up answers. Favorite Internet Dog! TikTok that made you cry! Best Practical Thing You Bought Yourself + Best Extravagant Thing! There's a lot more but I won't spoil them for you other than to say if you need a little very low stakes delight in your life right now, this episode is for you.” Low stakes delight? Sign me up.

• Bon Appetit rounds up the best Trader Joe’s foods of 2025.

• A roundup of 2025 celebrity scandals. Mmmmmm, delicious.

• Speaking of, I got sucked down a hole with the whole Olivia Nuzzi thing. Chelsea Devantez’s podcast Glamorous Trash breaks down the Nuzzi “memoir” and the surrounding drama with explanations of the side characters. The RFK “sexts” had me screaming. Is this real life, or? I can hardly tell anymore.

• Related: I am basically just a Heather Cox Richardson evangelist now. It’s my whole personality. Anybody want to understand history so the bad parts don’t repeat? Anybody? Too late/not too late?

• The only “best of” “end of year” lists I really enjoy are the books. I am long past knowing who anyone on “best of” music lists are. I don’t even try anymore. But the books, I can do. Here are NY Public Library, New Yorker (via Kepler’s Books & Magazines), and Literary Hub, which is a roundup of the top picks from an amalgamation of “best of” lists. The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny by Kiran Desai and Mother Mary Comes to Me by Arandhati Roy top the lists. Both going on my 2026 to-read.

• Heart the Lover by Lily King would be on my “best of” 2025, if I made one. Wrecked.

Ok, I’m tired, that’s it! I quit! Austin Kleon called this week “Dead Week” in his newsletter and it’s so funny and appropriate. We are dead tired this week. Let’s rest. If we can.

See you next week! xo, Robin

In this issue you will find:

• Thoughts on Winter Solstice/Yule and how my holiday altar shaped up this year

• Infused Herbal Honey for medicine and Sun thanks

• Honey SPELL JARS for magic

• A poem for today

• Cozy finds from this week!

Hi.

The Wheel of the Year keeps turning, everybody. We arrive at the winter solstice bedraggled, disparate, desperate for rest. What a year, am I right? What a ride we are on. I am grateful for the winter Sun on our faces.

The winter solstice occurs in the Northern Hemisphere today, December 21, and is the exact moment Earth’s axis reaches it’s maximum tilt away from the Sun, resulting in the least amount of direct sunlight for that hemisphere. It means the shortest day and the longest night of the year. When we begin our tilt back toward the Sun, daylight hours begin to increase. When we reach Summer Solstice on June 21, this moment is reversed and we start all over. Can you think of anything more romantic than this dance we do with our Sun? It’s tough to imagine. As humans on this tilting planet, we have celebrated the return of the Sun forever, back through time.

In Kindling the Celtic Spirit, Mara Freeman explains, “Rituals for welcoming back the sun date from the dawn of civilization, as communities came together to celebrate life with feasting, music, dance, drama, and above all, light and fire.” In modern times we think of Christmas as a single day or a one or two day event, but many cultures through time have celebrated this time of year over at least 12 days, and sometimes more. The Romans had Saturnalia, Syrian cultures celebrated the Birthday of the Unconquered Sun on December 25, Scandinavians celebrated Yule.

Celtic celebrations were likely a mix of Scandi and Norse traditions, the origins are unclear, but what we do know is that in the fourth century C.E., the Church of Rome overlaid the Celtic, pagan festivals with Christian traditions. The birth of the Sun became the birth of the Son. (So precious! Ok guys, lol?!) Many of the old traditions lived on however, as folks undoubtedly knew the deep importance of rituals needed to banish the dark and welcome back the light, regardless of what the establishment demanded.

In the mix of celebrations and rituals was a decorated Yule log, burnt on the hearth on top of a piece of last year’s wood, which was used to kindle the new one. Around the Yule log fire, our way back ancestors celebrated with music, eating and drinking, storytelling with family and friends. A piece of the Yule log was kept for the next year, when the ritual would repeat.

On a grander scale, ancient Celts likely observed the birth of the new Winter Sun at the five-thousand year-old earth chamber Newgrange, in what is now County Heath, Ireland. An ancient burial mound and likely place of religious ceremony, the entrance is perfectly aligned with the Winter Solstice sunrise. Freeman writes “On the first morning of the year’s turning toward the light, sunbeams shoot down the narrow passageway into the heart of the chamber.” The Sun arrives. The cycle dances on.

The Irish government is kind enough to livestream this magic for us. You can watch the morning light beams live here.

This year I could not get to Newgrange (if only), but I made my own offering in the form of a Winter Solstice/Yule altar. I gathered my elements, made my Minty Holiday Tea, and got to work:

Included in my altar: 

oranges and candles, little Suns
peppermint chocolate candies for my sister  
lebkuchen for the old Germans
gin for the maternal grandparents
oats for the Scottish, and paternal grandparents  
black tea and milk for the Irish 
stones, the bones of the Earth, and a little Yule log 
animals, pig and deer, a tiny bone antler 
incense smoke from garden sage and rosemary 
water for the parched 
cards: the Sun, spruce (Winter), the snake and fern (starting over), the moth and eucalyptus (an ending) 

As of this writing the exact moment of our tilt back toward the Sun has already happened (the internet tells me it was around 10am EST today) but it is not too late to celebrate. These moments on the Wheel of the Year are flexible, magical, ephemeral. Our observance does not need to be exact. Our reverence can ripple through the ether before and after these moments, out into space and time.

Herbal Medicine and Kitchen Table Notes

What medicine is more in sweet relationship to the Sun than honey? Golden, shining, sparkling in its fat jars and jugs, I think we sometimes take for granted this humble food that is deeply medicinal and made even moreso by the addition of nourishing plants and herbs.

In Herbal Homestead, Brittany Wood Nickerson explains that raw, unprocessed honey (honey not heated above 110 degrees F— the following information may not apply to processed honey), contains nutrient-dense and nourishing pollens: bee pollen contains 22 amino acids and multiple vitamins, minerals, and fatty acids, as well as enzymes and co-enzymes that make honey an aid for digestion and also an anti-oxidant. Bacteria does not grow inside honey itself and it is therefore shelf-stable at room temperature.

Honey stimulates the movement of lymphatic fluid: it encourages the transportation of immune cells and so is good immune system support. Honey is also soothing and healing to mucous membranes, making it helpful for healing inflammation of anywhere along the gastrointestinal tract (including a sore throat!).

Adding herbs that aid in immune system health, gut health, or nervous system support to make a herbal infused honey only multiplies these benefits. We talked about infusing honey when we sat with garlic as well. This recipe is adapted from Christine Buckley’s Plant Magic: Herbalism in Real Life.

Herbal Infused Honey

2 cups local, raw honey

about 1 cup dried herb of choice

Method: Warm the honey until it is a pourable consistency: set a saucepan of water over low heat until it is about 100 degrees F, turn off the heat, and set the glass jar of honey into the warm water for 10 minutes or so, or until it is pourable. Roughly chop or rub the herbs between your fingers so the parts are small, and add them to a glass quart jar. Pour the warm honey into the jar — it should cover the herbs completely so that when you tip the jar everything swims around with enough room. Remove any air bubbles with a chopstick. Cap and label. Flip the jar upside down every few days to make sure all of the herbs are really getting soaked with honey.

The infused honey is ready in two to four weeks! If you want to separate the herbs from the honey, warm the honey again like you did at the beginning and pour the honey through a strainer to remove the plant matter. Enjoy a spoonful straight or in a cup of tea.

Ideas for honey infusions: Infuse any of these by themselves, or make your own combinations: lemon balm, sage, thyme, rosemary, mints, bee balm, licorice, ginger, yarrow, vanilla bean, pine, jasmine, orange peel, fennel, rose, lavender, cardamom, anise, turmeric, pepper.

Bonus honey magic!

Make a honey spell jar. Write down on a piece of paper what you want to call sweetness to, or offer sweetness to. Put this piece of paper in a jar. Cover it with honey and herbs of your liking. I would place this on my altar for a few days or however long feels right. Talk to it, encourage the magic to work out in the world. When you feel the spell is complete, compost the honey and burn the paper. (Safely!)

A Poem for Today

Sunrise 
By Mary Oliver 

You can 
die for it -- 
an idea, 
or the world. People 

have done so, 
brilliantly, 
letting 
their small bodies be bound 

to the stake, 
creating 
an unforgettable 
fury of light. But 

this morning, 
climbing the familiar hills
in the familiar 
fabric of dawn, I thought 

of China, 
and India
and Europe, and I thought 
how the sun 

blazes 
for everyone just 
so joyfully
as it rises

under the lashes
of my own eyes, and I thought 
I am so many! 
What is my name? 

What is the name 
of the deep breath I would take 
over and over 
for all of us? Call it 

whatever you want, it is 
happiness, it is another one 
of the ways to enter 
fire. 

Cozy Corner

• It’s here, it’s “what kind of planner can I get for 2026 that will change my life completely so I will finally get my shit together” time!! I have had the Chani Astro planner for a few years and really like it. Gotta keep up with what those planets are up to.

• I love looking at the favorite tools of artists and writers who draw. Inspired, I snagged a set of Tombow pens this weekend to mess around with.

• I really, really want to see Hamnet. I was so moved by the novel; the trailer for the movie looks absolutely beautiful.

• Picked this novel up and started this week; really enjoying it so far. Late to this party but I always am!

Up Next

Through the Hedge! Thoughts and recs that swirl around this week!

Sources

Buckley, Christine. Plant Magic: Herbalism in Real Life. Roost Books, 2020.

Freeman, Mara. Kindling the Celtic Spirit: Ancient Traditions to Illumine Your Life Throughout the Seasons. Harper One, 2001.

Oliver, Mary. Dream Work. Grove Press, 1986.

Wood Nickerson, Brittany. The Herbal Homestead Journal: Inspiration, Guidance, & Recipes to Build Your Herbal Homestead. Self-published, 2015.

See you next week! xo, Robin

Hi.

Welcome to Through the Hedge! Every other week we will deliver the following, that is, a shorter, round-up style letter with links and recommendations for you that I have been thinking about, enjoying, and gathering this week. Next week we will return to regular longer-form writing and herbal medicine.

This week I offer a little list of winter solstice altar and offering preps. It takes a little planning and gathering to make a really sweet altar and/or Wheel of the Year observance and this time of year is bonkers so we’re thinking (just a little bit) ahead. Prep along for a witchy, Wheel of the Year moment with me!

The Winter Solstice is Sunday, December 21, though I usually celebrate these Wheel of the Year moments some time within a window of a few days on either side of the actual date. It’s not hard and fast rules. To prepare for this year, I plan to gather Winter Solstice/Yule altar elements and ingredients for a few special recipes this week.

Altars are useful for so many different things: for carving out a little space for paying attention, for connecting to ancestors or spirits or both, for paying homage, reverence, offering, praying, asking, and giving. This year I would like my altar to be for connection and thanks: to ancestors, and to the sun, for continuing to blaze on and return every solstice, through it all.

Some ideas for Yule altar elements to gather before this weekend include:

Candles (red, white, and green if you’re fancy); stuff from the green world, like evergreen sprigs, holly, rosemary, twigs, found acorns or pinecones, flowers, cactus fruit, whatever; water (water you left out to infuse with the energy of the recent supermoon if you’re fancy); incense or something else that smokes that evokes the feeling you’re after, including pine, cedar, frankincense, cinnamon, and other spicy, woodsy or green things; and pictures or some other visual representation of the spirits, deities, or ancestors you would like to commune with or offer to.

Next, the offerings: I like, always, to offer food and drink. What would your ancestors or the spirits or deities you’re speaking with like to eat or drink this time of year? What would delight them? I always include a little dish of oats for my way-back Scottish ancestors. Honey, for sweetness. Tea, for traveling. Whiskey or vodka for my maternal grandparents, who were drinkers. My paternal grandmother loved a box of See’s chocolates at Christmas— my uncle made sure it got to her every year and I’m sure I can come up with something similar for her. My sister loved peppermint bark, I think I’ll grab a tin at Trader Joe’s this week.

I’m also thinking of making something special from scratch this year, to sort of make an…impression. An extra special offering. We need all the help we can get, around here. Danielle Prohom Olson of Gather Victoria has a beautiful article on making what she calls “old food magic” for the holidays (Lutzelfrau & St. Lucy Tarts!). I love old food magic. I found a Christmas Cake in Celtic Folklore Cooking I think I might try. It’s basically a fruitcake…that you feed a sprinkle of rum every few days over the course of a week, or a month, whatever. Of course, you can make it without the rum.

I found a lovely herbal tea recipe that I’m going to gather for this week too, to have while setting up my altar on Saturday or Sunday. From The Kosmic Kitchen Cookbook:

Minty Holiday Tea

1 tbsp dried rooibos tea 
1 tbsp dried lemon balm 
1/2 tsp dried fennel seeds 
2 tsp dried peppermint 

That’s it! The Winter Solstice/Yule altar will stay up in my house probably until the next Wheel holiday. On Sunday we will dive deeper into the solstice/Yule, a really cool moment on the Wheel of the Year.

See you next week! xo, Robin

In this issue you will find:

• Thoughts about the darkness

• Nettle as an ally of fortification and witnessing

• Building deep immunity for the hard work ahead with a special chai recipe

• A poem about snakes in the dark

Hi.

I am usually the first one up in the morning in my family. I make the tea and coffee, give Rosie her breakfast, do my morning routine and devotions. But this week, I have been having trouble getting out of bed. It is so dark, and chilly, the covers so heavy and perfectly snuggled, everything still. It seems impossible to choose to throw all of that off and get up. These weeks leading up to the winter solstice on December 21 contain the longest nights of the year. So long, so cold, so much darkness.

This week I listened to the author and scholar of grief Frances Weller on Adrienne Marie and Autumn Brown’s podcast How to Survive the End of the World. Weller said that the Inuit have a word: “Qarrtsiluni. [Which] translates quite literally [to] sitting quietly together in the darkness, waiting expectantly for something creative to burst forth. And that’s where we are right now.” I write from the United States in 2025. The Long Dark indeed.

But what creative, generative sparks exist in this fertile darkness? What is waiting to burst forth? What new world is waiting for us to build it? Right now we sit and wait in the dark for something to gleam through. Weller went on, “Within qarrtsiluni is several values that we do not practice in this culture, which is restraint, reverence, and patience.” We need to practice all of those for sure. I also need to practice a little acceptance. That we are in the Long Dark right now. Maybe right now it is okay to stay in bed a little longer, to stare into the dark for a while. Don’t move. Just look out into the black morning and wait for the sparks.

There is time to sit in the fertile dark and stare, and nurture that darkness. And then there is the moment when of course it is time to get up and move. The power is out in this collective house (haha I thought to link to something there to illustrate our current collective darkness but what, literally, would I choose? I could be here all day), and at some point someone still has to get up and make the tea and coffee. Figure it out. Grab a candle and then probably figure out how to make candles. There is work to be done now, and more in the future, and it will be hard, hard work to build this new world that is brewing.

What allies can help us? Who can sit with us and then get up when we need to move? The plants, of course. As we will get into below, nettle is a powerful ally. Nettle is the most loving but also the most fiercest of all grandmothers. She will kick your ass, and then make you soup. Nettle is a staunch ally. Nettle will witness our struggle. Nettle will sit with us in the dark and will stand with us when we need to stand. Nettle will not bow or shudder.

Reaching for candles and nettles for the longest nights, and waiting for the sparks and the next steps to shine through.

Herbal Medicine and Kitchen Table Notes

Nettle is the favorite, the spiky darling of the herbalists and witches. Though they appear in the wild in spring, they’re easy enough to get in dried form and can absolutely help us in the winter and in all seasons. I’ve never met an herbalist who didn’t love them, revere their power, and recommend them for almost all ills. Fairy tales have been written about them (see: The Wild Swans), the dried stalks spun into cordage and yarn throughout time, the folklore and history abounds. But the medicine, the medicine.

Stinging Nettle (the most common species found in North America is urtica dioica) can be found growing wild almost anywhere. Farms, compost heaps, gardens, meadows, bicycle paths, edges, and hedges. Bright green with jagged-edged leaves, stinging nettles have very fine hairs that cover the entire plant and contain venom at the base. The hairs easily break off and deliver their sting when touched. When harvested and dried or cooked, the venom loses its potency and is not detectable when ingested after drying or cooking.

One of our most nutritive herbs, with highly bioavailable (bioavailability is the ease with which our bodies can absorb a nutrient and put it to use) calcium, magnesium, potassium, and silica, they are also rich in iron and chlorophyll, and support alkalinity (as opposed to acidity) in the body. Nettles (among other actions) are a diuretic, an adrenal tonic, a gentle kidney cleanser, and a mild antihistimine.

Nettles, like many of our highly nutritive herbs, are safe to use as a tonic, meaning they can be ingested daily to nourish and bring balance to body systems that have gotten out of whack. Tonic herbs are best taken as infusions (tea). To really address an imbalance, drink two to four cups of nourishing nettle tea every day for a few weeks and then see how you feel. Better, I’ll bet. Fortified. Witnessed.

To make a nourishing Nettles Infusion:

The simplest equipment is required: you can keep it as simple as 2 tablespoons of loose tea leaves or blend, your favorite mug, and a simple small metal strainer- the kind that sits across your cup. Steep for 5-10 minutes, discard the spent tea material, and sip away. I like to make 2-3 cups at a time, so I place my dry herbs in an inexpensive glass French coffee press and cover with boiling water and let steep for 5-10 minutes.

Nettles are wonderful alone but also as a base for tea blends. Some combinations I love:

• Nettles, tusli (also called holy basil), mint

• Nettles, skullcap, oatstraw or oat tops

• Nettles, red raspberry leaf, red clover

• Nettles, rose hips, ginger

Herbalist Brittany Wood Nickerson created my favorite homemade Chai recipe, which requires some spice cabinet stuff and a little time at the stove but we can handle it. I plan to drink nettle infusions and this chai until the solstice. Fortified. Witnessed.

Immune Strengthening Chai

3 tsp dried herbs (nettle! chamomile! a blend! whatever! but nettle, seriously)
2 tsp chopped fresh ginger (or 1tsp dried)
2 tsp cinnamon chips or 1 1/2 sticks
2 tsp chopped fresh orange peel (or 1 tsp dried) 
10 black peppercorns
6 cardamom pods  (I bash these up a bit to release the good stuff)
3 cloves
1 star anise pod

You do not need to adhere strictly to the above amounts (this is an art, not a science) but use as a guide. Double this recipe (triple? winter is long) and keep it in a mason jar, and use 1 tbsp of the blend for every 1 cup of cold water when you're ready to make the tea. Combine the herbs and water in a saucepan and simmer on low (this is also called decocting) for 20 minutes. Strain, add honey and milk to taste, and enjoy. If you need a little caffeine kick here (I always do), after you decoct the herbs, turn off the heat, add a black tea bag to the pot, put the lid on, and steep for a few minutes before you strain and add milk and honey. 

A Poem for Today

Snakes in Winter

by Mary Oliver

Deep in the woods, 
under the sprawled upheavals of rocks, 

dozens lie coiled together. 
Touch them: they scarcely 

breathe; they stare 
out of such deep forgetfulness

that their eyes are like jewels--
and asleep, though they cannot close. 

And in each mouth the forked tongue, 
sensitive as an angel's ear, 

lies like a drugged muscle.
With the fires of spring they will lash forth again 

on their life of ribs! --
bodies like whips! 

But now under the lids of the mute 
succeeding snowfalls

they sleep in their cold cauldron: a flickering broth 
six months below simmer. 

Cozy Corner

• The moon lights our way. This past week brought us the last full SUPERMOON of the year, and when it falls in December indigenous cultures call it a Cold Moon. The Farmer’s Almanac continues to delight.

• I know, more Patti Smith, but I’m just having a moment (ok my whole life). Her new memoir Bread of Angels is just so her, so gorgeous, so good. She is friends with the dark and the light.

• We actually can make our own candles if (when) we need to. Catherine Newman’s instagram post on how she saves all of her candle drippings and makes new candles out of them, a cycle that could potentially go on forever, is a comfort. Where to store your gallon ziplock bags of melted candle wax in a tiny house is a problem, but I’m handling it.

Up Next!

Through the Hedge! Thoughts and recs that swirl around this week! In two weeks we dive into the WINTER SOLSTICE, where the light returns! We will get into it.

Sources

Alicandro-Mace, Jade. For the Love of Nettles. E-book, received as part of her e-course Spice Rack Medicine.

Groves, Maria Noel. Body Into Balance: An Herbal Guide to Holistic Self-Care. Storey Publishing, 2016.

Nickerson, Brittany. The Herbal Homestead Journal: Inspiration, Guidance, & Recipes to Build Your Herbal Homestead. Self-Published, 2012.

Oliver, Mary. Devotions. The Selected Poems of Mary Oliver. Penguin Random House, 2017.

See You Next Week! xo, Robin

Hi.

Welcome to Through the Hedge! Every other week we will deliver the following, that is, a shorter, round-up style letter with links and recommendations for you that I have been thinking about, enjoying, and gathering this week. Next week we will return to regular longer-form writing and herbal medicine.

1. Thanksgiving happened, it was very good, very good. Can we get cozy for winter now? I know the work is not over, those December holidays loom, and it’s not officially winter until December 21, but for a few weeks can we lean in to just the cozy winter vibes? Our Christmas tree tradition started as an ancient folk practice of bringing evergreens (including holly, ivy, box, bay, yew, and rosemary) inside the house during winter as a reminder of the green world during the dark months.

2. Fiber Cult members (complimentary) unite, for it is our Season. Having something warm moving through your hands in a pattern, a rhythm, when it’s cold and harsh outside, is it’s own meditation and comfort. Learn to Knit Kit. Learn to Crochet. Not interested in Fiber Cult? (This is said in jest, people who love fiber crafts aren’t really in a cult. Are we??) I am intrigued by the resurgence of the Paint by Number.

3. While your hands are meditating, ‘tis the season for the television binge (ok that’s every season). BritBox has really been meeting the need to sink into the couch and escape for a while. Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple, anyone? “The Body in the Library” and “The Murder at the Vicarage” are both 10/10. Lots of people I know (also me) are also digging in to The American Revolution by Ken Burns. Either way.

   

4. Audiobooks also come in handy for cozy escape while you have busy hands. I just finished The Road to Tender Hearts by Annie Hartnett. Excellent read, highly recommend. I did keep picturing Jeffrey “the Dude” Lebowski in the place of main character PJ Halliday, described as “an old man on a cross-country mission to reunite with his high school crush,” but that did not detract from my enjoyment of the novel at all.

   

5. Do you need a snack while doing all of this cozy-making? Probably. While making Thanksgiving food this week I was reminded of my Appalachian family’s food holiday spreads and the thing I think I will need to make soon is this Pumpkin Roll, which made an appearance at every food holiday table of my childhood. (For some reason the Libby food company thought it was fine to leave a blurry picture of said pumpkin roll at the link there, which makes me laugh). Is the pumpkin roll totally weird but also totally delicious and wonderful? Yes, both.

6. In other seasonal news, man, the gift guides are flying, aren’t they? My inbox is hot, hot, hot with deals, deals, deals! Most of it is exhausting. A few are not. Catherine Newman’s annual guide is, unsurprisingly, a delight. Games, puzzles, art supplies, books. Ameila Hruby’s gift guide was also helpful and chill. Anne Helen Petersen just dropped her annual Culture Study gift guide this morning, where she lists hundreds of great finds from small businesses and also links to multiple organizations where we can donate to the cause of supporting families currently being targeted by ICE.

7. Massachusetts herbalist Jade Alicandro Mace of Milk and Honey Herbs is a foundational teacher for me on my herbal medicine journey. She opens her online course Spice Rack Medicine once a year for study during the winter months. The course is now open for enrollment until December 12. Highly recommend.

8. Another foundational teacher of mine is Lynda Barry, whose 2008 work What It Is is my morning reading right now and is so inspiring. Lynda writes that “We don’t create a fantasy world to escape reality, we create it to be able to stay. I believe we have always done this, used images to stand and understand what otherwise would be intolerable.” Yes, yes, yes. What It Is, Drawn & Quarterly, 2008.

9. Speaking of the intolerable, childhood hunger in America is not going away any time soon. No Kid Hungry is still getting my dollars. Join me?

Up Next:

We will spiral into deep time and let ourselves be stung by the magical stinging nettle!

See you next week! xo, Robin

In this issue you will find:

• A garlic documentary and a 19 year old’s journey to Berkeley, CA

• an exploration of garlic’s magic and medicine

• a poem to dream into (long, but worth it!)

• Patti Smith, and other delights

Hi.

This week I watched the 1980 Les Blank documentary called “Garlic is as Good as Ten Mothers,” filmed at a Gilroy, California garlic festival and at famed Berkeley restaurant Chez Panisse, around their own annual culinary garlic festival, held over a few days every Bastille Day. The idea that garlic could replace the powerful love and protection of not one but TEN mothers was not really an argument fleshed out in the film—it was really just a love letter to the humble allium, an exploration of a little cult of garlic-heads, a subculture that felt very California, very 1970s. I loved it. A few stills follow, including a poster for the 1977 Chez Panisse Garlic Festival (left), a poster for the documentary (the 10 mothers!, center), and a Gilroy Garlic Festival enthusiast, explaining why garlic changes everything. Why garlic is radical.

When I was 19 I left the Phoenix suburbs and moved by myself to Berkeley, CA, with a few boxes of books and journals and a suitcase. I sub-let a room a few blocks from Shattuck Avenue and for a whole summer, I wandered Berkeley alone. The Bay Area is grey and drizzly in June, July, and August. Everything was muted, lush green, and damp, and crows caw-caw-cawed above me, my constant companions. The trees were massive, smelled spicy and of the earth, and the sidewalks of the neighborhoods behind the bustle of Shattuck were hushed and covered in shade. Cell phones were not a thing then. If anyone wanted me they had to call the apartment land line, and I might have been there but most often I was out, walking. No one called anyway. I walked, I drank coffee and ate massive, stale cookies in a battered, dingy cafe on Shattuck, I read books, I shuffled through the bins of cds and records in Rasputin Music.

That summer I found Alice Waters and Chez Panisse. The restaurant was not in my part of Berkeley and I would not have dreamed of having the money to eat there but I found an article about Alice in the SF Chronicle, whose Wednesday food section was a weekly treasure for my budding food passions. By the late 1990’s when I discovered her, Alice Waters had already been at her slow food revolution for 20 years and had been doing the Chez Panisse Bastille Day Garlic Festival for years at that point. I fell in love. Something about the way she wrote about food, spoke about food, reverberated deep in me. No one can talk about or write about a salad of simple greens and a hand-made vinaigrette like Alice.

I realize now that Alice’s job was then and is still to offer deep reverence to simple ingredients and then transform them into delicious food. That’s it. Reverence and transformation. A baby witch saw a grown up one at work and said yes.

In the fall I got a job in San Francisco and moved to Noe Valley with roommates who were friends of a co-worker. My explorations turned city-side. But that first summer in Berkeley was eye-opening. Radical.

Herbal Medicine and Kitchen Table Notes

Herbal medicine works for both illness prevention and for boosting the immune system in the event of an acute invader like a virus. Our humble culinary partner and ally garlic (allium sativum) shines in both areas. Pungent foods like onions, garlic, and ginger, and herbs like clove, oregano, and our friend rosemary, warm a sluggish or cold body and can help a runny nose, congestion, or wet cough by bringing warmth and circulation, helping digestion, opening airways, and encouraging mucus to flow, carrying germs out of the body.

It has been proposed that Europeans who witnessed ravaging diseases like rabies, tuberculosis, and plague turned to garlic remedies, perhaps giving rise to the idea that garlic warded off evil. (Vampires! The word nosferatu originates in the Greek word nosophorus, which means “plague carrier.”) The common remedy Four Thieves Vinegar (which included garlic, rosemary, thyme, sage, and oregano, among other herbs) was originally created during the medieval period to ward off both the spells of evil sorceresses and the plague.

Now (thanks, science!) we know how it works. We now know that garlic is antimicrobial, and can ward off bacterial, viral, and fungal pathogens and parasites. Garlic is also anti-inflammatory and contains anti-oxidant sulfur compounds that protect and detoxify. Garlic is especially helpful to the immune and cardiovascular systems of the body, and studies have shown it can make modest improvements over time in both systems.

Autumn tends toward coldness and dryness in the northern hemisphere, and so is a natural season to reach for foods and herbs that warm us. Cooked vegetables, garlic, and onions, as well as spices like cinnamon, nutmeg, and cardamom support our systems, protect us, and keep us warm.

Though it packs the biggest medicinal punch when raw, garlic retains medicinal benefits even when cooked. A few recipes follow for the ongoing project of a stocked fall herbal medicine cabinet to reach for in addition to our regular store-bought remedies.

Tea and Care for Sick Season

Both of the following recipes are adapted from Christine Buckley’s Plant Magic: Herbalism in Real Life. Both are special. I know we talked about magic broth already but it’s just the season! And this one with it’s added garlic boost is just so supportive when you feel a cold coming on. I keep lots of garlic around always, but especially in the fall and winter for recipes like this. Just in case.

Fermented Garlic Honey

1 medium-large head of garlic, each clove peeled and smashed

1 cup honey

Apple cider vinegar (ACV, optional)

Place garlic in a wide-mouth glass pint jar and add honey, completely covering the cloves. Be sure to leave 1.5 inches or so between the honey-garlic mixture and the lid. Place the lid on loosely and put in a dark place. Burp the jar every few days (unscrewing the lid to release the gas) and flip it over. After 3 days or so, bubbles should start to form. The honey will get increasingly liquid over time. If you’re worried about bacteria formation, test with litmus PH strips and keep the pH under 4.6. A splash of ACV will bring the pH down. Ferment for at least a week. Take a clove of garlic with a spoonful of the honey at the onset of cold symptoms.

Everyday Medicinal Broth (With Garlic BOOST)

1 organic chicken carcass

2 tbsp ACV

1 onion, quartered, you can leave the skin on

1 tablespoon black peppercorns

3-4 whole heads of garlic, cut in half horizontally, bashed up a bit

a few pieces of dried reishi mushroom (optional)

a cup of dried shiitakes (optional)

a few other herbs as you like—thyme, rosemary, or nettle

Add the above ingredients to a large stockpot and cover with 8-10 cups of water. Simmer for three to four hours, and up to 6-8 hours on the stove. Remove the chicken carcass and strain the broth. Add salt to taste, and drink straight or use as a base for other soups or stews.

A Poem For Today

Berkeley in the Nineties

by Tess Taylor

Too late for hippie heyday

& too young to be yuppies

we wandered creeksides & used bookstores.

There were still so many movie theaters.

Our parents marched against the many wars

& fed us carob chips. We foraged

in free boxes for old wrap skirts

but had absorbed consumerist desire,

& also longed for new J. Crew.

There was no internet yet & so we listened

to Steve Miller Band on repeat

& cut geometry to skinny dip

in the Essex Street hot tub.

We knew the code, just as we knew

to disapprove of America.

We walked out of high school

after Rodney King. We helped our mothers

shop for bulk oats at the Co-op.

We felt we could & couldn’t

solve it. We could say systemic racism

but couldn’t name yet how our lives were implicated.

We drove our grandmothers’ Volvos up Marin

& watched the spangled world

from Grizzly Peak. We climbed Mount Diablo

in spring rain. We learned

the meaning of the word hegemony

but thought the word itself was hegemonic.

We got high to the patter of the windchimes.

When we missed our friends

we wandered to the farmers market

for bruised peaches. Bruised peaches were

our kind of revolution. There was not internet yet & so

we made elaborate cutout flyers to invite

our friends to picnics up at Codornices.

Bodies in space were revolution.

Some of us were feminist & queer.

Some of us wore wool sailor pants

& passed out at bad university parties.

Oh my god, that was embarrassing.

Some of us cut class to spend

days reading in the dank public library.

Alone in our aloneness we fumbled

with one another’s bodies

in dim alleyways near City Lights.

Our revolution: under cherry blossoms,

reading Virgil. One of us made red

mushroomy kombucha. One of us

taught the others to eat burdock.

The burdock eating didn’t really take.

Some days we paid the toll

for people behind us

on the Richmond-San Rafael Bridge.

At Steep Ravine howled Whiteman at the sea.

Most days, we were a crumbling outpost. Nearby

the street preacher, Paul of the Pillar,

spoke in helter-skelter baritones from

liberated air on the Cal campus.

We too believed in liberated air & some nights

bought Paul sausages at Top Dog.

Under the Campanile, we discussed

how Ginsburg was a sellout now because he posed

for Gap ads in wide-legged chinos.

Chinos were not the revolution.

Trigonometry was not the revolution.

We memorized short poems by D. H. Lawrence.

We were quick fish who read

Gary Snyder in someone’s dad’s Mendocino cabin.

Some of us climbed ferny gullies

on winter solstice & got topless.

Decorated each other in white reindeer lichen.

Recited the Tao Te Ching. Had sex on a cliff.

Reindeer lichen was the revolution.

We craved transcendental revelations,

the radical & burning future:

We lobbied for condoms in the high school bathrooms

even though the bathrooms needed toilet paper—

Cozy Corner

• Despite our moans and groans it is here, it’s shopping season, and sale season. Maybe keep it local, keep it radical: Arizona’s beloved Tucson Herb Store is a wonderful source for herbal preparations and magical goodies.

• The author, poet, and godmother of punk Patti Smith is one of my oldest spirit guides. She has a new memoir, Bread of Angels: A Memoir. Listening to the audiobook as I love to hear her read. Her interview on The Ezra Klein Show was a delight. I’m paraphrasing but her declaration that she is old now, and doesn’t need much, and can work anywhere, and only wants to keep working, was so touching.

• Cody Cook-Parrott’s new book The Practice of Attention: Cultivating Presence in a Distracted World is open for pre-orders! We all know by now that pre-orders really help authors. Let’s do it.

• Thanksgiving: Go!

Up Next

Through the Hedge! Short thoughts and recs that swirl around this week.

Sources

Buckley, Christine. Plant Magic: Herbalism in Real Life. Roost Books, 2020.

Ducham, Brittany. Radical Remedies: An Herbalist’s Guide to Empowered Self-Care. Roost Books, 2021.

Groves, Maria Noel. Body Into Balance: An Herbal Guide to Holistic Self-Care. Hachette Book Group, 2016.

Magical Potions for Everyday Care: Accessible Herbs + Processes zine, Snake Hair 2020.

See you next week! xo, Robin

In this issue you will find:

Thoughts, links, and recs that swirled around this week!

Hi.

Welcome to Through the Hedge! Every other week we will deliver the following, that is, a shorter, round-up style letter with links and recommendations for you that I have been thinking about, enjoying, and gathering this week. Next week we will return to regular longer-form writing and herbal medicine.

1. The idea that our attention is sacred comes from the title of the book that podcaster, writer, big thinker Amelia Hruby published recently called Your Attention is Sacred Except on Social Media. When you go to her website offthegrid.fun, the banner is huge: “THE ALGORITHM’S F*CKING WITH YOUR CREATIVITY, CAPACITY, & CASHFLOW.” I’m just…feeling this. It is just, as they say, resonating. I spent a lot less time on my phone this week, on purpose. That’s it. Saying any more about it will likely trigger my inner tantrum baby to pick up the phone and spend the next three hours in the scroll. Amelia’s podcast is called Off the Grid, and it is wonderful for making me think about the ol’ algorithm and what is all actually going on here.

2. When I do pick up the phone, one of the places I love to spend time is the comments section of the Culture Study newsletter by Anne Helen Petersen: the periodic call to answer What are you reading? is like walking up to a sprawling buffet of your favorite stuff to eat. The comments regularly top 1,000 so gorging is encouraged.

3. Speaking of books, love of my life but she doesn’t know it Catherine Newman just published a new novel, Wreck. On top of the to-be-read pile.

   

4. Speaking of creative women I love, Lindy West and Megan Hatcher Mays are two best friends whose best friend podcast Text Me Back brings me joy every week. Last week Megan said she couldn’t believe Oregon senator Jeff Merkley agreed to come on their “fart podcast” and it was such a funny way to describe what they do—it’s not about farts, it’s two best friends farting around. And being very, very funny.

   

5. Another place I paid attention this week: Thanksgiving menus. They come around every. single. year, don’t they? What an avalanche of media content to consume around turkey and mashed potatoes. I love food and thinking about food (see last week’s Through the Hedge), but there is really only so much new to say about the humble turkey dinner, folks. I like a well-roasted brussels sprout as much as the next guy but I think Caro’s advice to keep it very, very simple is the way to go. (I also love her calling sweet potato casserole a “soft, slouchy thing”).

6. The question of where I pay attention also came into sharp focus this week when I heard a Justin Bieber song on accident, got surprised, took a few steps, and fell straight down a Bieber rabbit hole. (Speaking of avalanches of media content.) What got me was the element of surprise, in a moment in this time and place when it sometimes feels like almost nothing is surprising or delightful.

7. Since it started streaming this weekend, I finally watched One Battle After Another. I think I sat through the whole thing with a goofy grin on my face. What a ride. I had not watched a Leo movie in a long time.

   

8. Finally, attention, surprise, and delight all came together on an elementary school field trip last week to The Orpheum. I found myself in a theatre with 500 second and third graders who were having a very tough time with attention both waiting for the performance to start and during it. The place was buzzing with little kid energy, it washed through the crowd of them like ocean waves, they could not sit still. The Tetra String Quartet did their best to hold the kids, and mostly failed, until the end, when they gifted the kids with a rendition of “Golden,” from the movie K-Pop Demon Hunters. Again, it was a string quartet, so no words. The kids immediately obliged. Delightful. Now this was a good use of my phone:

   

   Up Next:

   We return to the fall medicine cabinet and tea and care for sick season, and will wax poetic about our old friend GARLIC!!

   See you next week! xo, Robin

   Hedge Tender is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

In this Issue You Will Find:

• Well, you get the idea

  

Hi.

Protection is on my mind this week. Protection for my loved ones, my home, for people out here in this messy world trying to protect others. Being a mother is an absolutely wild experience for so many reasons but one of the most wild is that while you know logically that you cannot control so many things (it feels like anything) about what happens to your child after they leave your body, your body is wired to try and protect them. Like a wild animal protects their young. The instinct is beyond logic. And yet. The chaos presses in, the predators lurking in the darkness feel real (because they are). Mothers do not have a monopoly on protection instincts, of course, and we all have people, places, things, beings that we clutch desperately to our hearts, worry over, love.

There is no solving this dilemma, it is part of being a human on this planet. If you love something let it go, and all that. However, also part of being a human is the ability to ask for help, to look around and see what we can do, to try and see what we can make out of all of this to help us through. Lucky for us, the plants we live with in this messy world can help. We can ask the plants to help us. And all the gods and goddesses thank them, they will.

In Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants, Robin Wall Kimmerer reminds us that “In some native languages the term for plants translates to ‘those who take care of us.’”

The plant that I turn to first for help with protection care is rosemary. A few years ago I planted a little starter I got from a nursery in one of those big terra cotta pots you buy at Home Depot. I gave her a dedicated watering spout and went about my life. Now, she is a beautiful sprawling monster, taller and three times as wide as my youngest child, if he could climb inside she would hide him. As the darkness closes in, it’s nice to have the option. Until then, I hide sprigs in backpacks, I imagine wreaths of rosemary around little bodies as they move around in the world.

There are too many things to say about the properties, actions, history, and lore of rosemary for one newsletter, and so many herbalists can say those things better than me, but I want to provide just a few things here in general, to sit with rosemary, to offer this list in thanks. The first thing to know is that rosemary does not just provide protection care, ROSEMARY CAN DO EVERYTHING.

Rosemary’s Magical Correspondences: From The Spirited Kitchen: “Ancestral memory, blessing of unions, purification, remembrance, clarity, protection, lifts depression. Connected to both sun and moon.”

Rosemary’s Magical Actions: Cleansing, drawing the aid of spirits, love, mental focus, protection, exorcism, healing.

Rosemary as Incense. Rosemary is one of the oldest incenses. My backyard rosemary provides ample branches for drying, and when all of the sprigs are dried out I bring them in and rosemary is my number one burning herb inside the house. Sprinkle the leaves on a burning charcoal, if you like, but I am a lazy witch who is also often short on time so I usually just pile them up on an old chipped mussel shell and light them, waving the smoke through the house most weekends as a ward against the coming week’s bullshit and a cleansing of the last week’s woes. Call it a ritual, call it a protection spell.

Rosemary as Ancestral Remembrance. Rosemary is old, it spirals us into deep time. Wild rosemary originated in the Mediterranean, but has grown all over the globe for centuries. Celtic monks at the Abbey of St. Gall in Switzerland, founded in 720, kept a record of the herb garden there starting in about 800, and those records show the garden included over thirty herbs and vegetables—including rosemary. From the cookbook of Robert May, 1671: “Rosemary purifies and wards off negative emotions, so is an excellent additive to a spring tonic. It is also well loved by faeries.” From Sir Thomas Moore (1478-1535): “As for rosemary I lette it runne all over my garden walls, not onlie because my bees love it, but because it is the herb sacred to remembrance and to friendship.”

“Don’t argue with drunken warriors, mead steals the minds of many.” (Celtic proverb).

“An Olde Mead Recipe” from a 17th century cookbook, as told in Celtic Folklore Cooking: “Put a handful of thyme, rosemary, sweet briar, eyebright, wood betony, scabious, wormwood, agrimony (of each a like quantity) and let steep for 24 hours in a wooden bowl….”

Herbal Medicine and Kitchen Table Notes

Rosemary radiates heat, like the sun. Take a bunch of rosemary branches and rub them between your hands, feel the warmth it generates. The resin lasts for hours, sharp and glowing. It is confident, clear, unwavering. When we think of remedies for ailments of the body that are cold, wet, stagnant, or boggy, we think of rosemary. Warm, soothing topical washes for skin infections. Added to fire cider for antiseptic actions. Hot tea for focus and mild stimulation. A rosemary bath for deep warming and clarity.

Rosemary’s actions on the body. Improves focus, memory, concentration, blood pressure, circulation, antiseptic, antidepressant, eases indigestion.

A few tea combinations to try:

rosemary and honey

rosemary, thyme, cloves

lemongrass, rosemary, thyme

rosemary, lavender, catnip (mood)

An especially lovely remedy (see above, for so many things) is rosemary-infused honey. It can fight respiratory infection and coat and soothe a sore throat, or just delight your senses stirred into one of the above cups of tea.

Rosemary Honey

To make an 8 oz jar of infused honey, you will need

2 tablespoons dried rosemary leaves (I bash them up a little bit, squiggle them around in my hands, to encourage the oils to release)

1 tablespoon orange peel

a few slices of fresh ginger (or 1 tsp dried)

1 cup (preferably local, raw) honey

Fill the jar a quarter of the way up with the rosemary, orange peel, and ginger (or a little more, or a little less, folk herbalism is an art, not a science). Pour the honey on top of the herbs and stir with a chopstick or knife to incorporate. Let sit in a cool, dark spot for at least 7 days, the longer the better. I stir the honey into my tea plant matter and all (lazy witch), but if you want to strain the plant matter out, fill a medium-sized pot with a few inches of water and add the jar of honey. Slowly warm the honey, occasionally stirring, so the honey becomes more liquid and easier to strain. When at the desired consistency, pour the honey through a mesh strainer into a clean, wide-mouth jar with a lid. Store in a cool, dark place.

A Poem for Today

Kin To Sorrow

By Edna St. Vincent Millay

Am I kin to Sorrow,

That so oft

Falls the knocker of my door –

Neither loud nor soft,

But as long accustomed,

Under Sorrow’s hand?

Marigolds around the step

And rosemary stand,

And then comes Sorrow –

And what does Sorrow care

For the rosemary

Or the marigolds there?

Am I kin to Sorrow?

Are we kin?

That so oft upon my door –

Oh, come in!

Cozy Corner

• Next weekend I will be joining Cody Cook Parrott, a guest teacher, and others for the extremely cozy workshop Quilt in a Weekend. (“Dedication! Devotion! A Finished Object!”)

• I drink a lot (gallons) of strong Irish black tea with oat milk because coffee (oh, coffee, I love you) hurts my guts. I’ve been drinking Barry’s brand since early in the pandemic and just moved from the “Gold” to the “Master Blend.” So cozy.

• This show needs no endorsement but as always, fall comes with the pinnacle of cozy food shows. Just wrapped (for us) this week. The Great British Bake Off.

Up Next

Through the Hedge! Short thoughts, recs, and links that swirl around this week.

Sources

Asala, Joanne. Celtic Folklore Cooking. Llewellyn Publications, 1998.

Beith, Mary. Healing Threads: Traditional Medicines of the Highlands and Islands. Birlinn Origin, 1995.

Ducham, Brittany. Radical Remedies. An Herbalist’s Guide to Empowered Self-Care. Roost Books, 1991.

Keane, Maeg. Rosemary, Plant of the Sun.

The Gleaming Feast

rosemary, plant of the sun

Hello! Welcome to The Gleaming Feast where I heap devotions to the stars, planets, and plants onto your table…

Read more

a year ago · 72 likes · 8 comments · Maeg Keane

Metzner, Ralph. The Well of Remembrance: Rediscovering the Earth Wisdom Myths of Northern Europe. Shambhala Publications, 1994.

Robbins, Shawn, and Bedell, Charity. The Good Witch’s Guide: A Modern-Day Wiccapedia of Magickal Ingredients and Spells. Sterling Ethos. 2017.

Spagnola, Carmen. The Spirited Kitchen: Recipes and Rituals for the Wheel of the Year. Countryman Press, 2022.

See you next week! xo, Robin

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