by Maia Toll
Mullein
Verbascum species
Mullein appears where she’s needed and has trouble staying where she’s not. Because of her penchant for moving about, over the years she’s learned quite a bit about quite a bit, making her a wise guide on any journey. Mullein brings multifaceted understandings into alignment with each other — easily building intellectual bridges between seemingly disparate or disjointed things — because her gift is seeing the structure of the whole. She’ll sing the relationship of bone to water, or air to skin, in a way that makes you wonder how you never saw those patterns for yourself. Call on Mullein when you need a torch in the darkness or an overview of the whole so you can understand the parts.
Ritual
Think Macro
Understanding how things influence each other is key to seeing the deeper patterns at work in the world. In your mind, as a sketch, or in a journal, find the threads that connect these seemingly separate things.
an acorn and a butterfly
the moon and a ship
your head and your heart
Connect Disparate Things
Many years ago I took a workshop with Tom Robbins, author of Jitterbug Perfume. Since it was a long time ago, I’m running fast and loose with Tom’s exact phrasing, but essentially he said that the job of a writer is to connect disparate things, like a Twinkie and Jupiter or the chiming of a grandfather clock and a swallow’s mad dash from the barn eaves. Writing can help you make connections and see the macro.
Reflection
Spider Medicine
Mullein is like a spider sitting on her web, feeling the vibrations along various threads and seeing from the center how it all connects. Imagine all the parts of your life as a giant network, with every person, place, and thing connected. Think of yourself as Spider sitting in the center of her web. Imagine the threads stretching out from where you sit. Bring consciousness to your connectivity. Are there parts of your life that need to be integrated into the whole? Now choose an action you’re considering or a decision you’re making. Feel out along your web. What or who will be affected by your choice?
However far back you go you will find all experiences linked by slender threads.
Robert Hellenga, Philosophy Made Simple
Defying Gravity
Reishi
Ganoderma lucidum
Reishi mushroom is the Yoda of the plant world, helping you assimilate life’s experiences and turn them into wisdom. The Taoists teach that Reishi can show you where your power lies, which some might call your destiny. Reishi’s not some soft, clingy mushroom but instead a strong, structured, gravity-defying shelf. She asks no less from you: how can you defy anything keeping you from finding meaning, purpose, and health? Like all the best teachers, Reishi points to the path and lets you walk it, taking your lumps and bumps along the way. She doesn’t want you to rely on her strength; she wants you to find your own. But if you’re willing to do the work, Reishi will help you transform from the inside out.
Ritual
Write and Burn
To find your path and step into your own power, you need to release whatever is no longer serving your highest good. If your home or work space is full of stuff, call on Reishi energy and move along what you no longer need. Clutter, whether material or emotional, blocks you from stepping into your true work. If stale thoughts or ways of being need to be released, try this:
Write down thoughts or emotions you want to be rid of. Don’t worry about spelling or grammar or handwriting — just write!
When you feel emptied, take the paper and burn it to ash, setting the intention to fully release the thoughts and feelings that no longer serve.
Sprinkle the ashes on the earth (or add them to the dirt in a potted plant), where the thoughts and feelings can be further broken down and composted.
Reflection
Step into Your Superpower
Do you know where your power lies? What gives you strength and vitality?
Oftentimes we think our superpower is the thing that makes those around us happy or comfortable. But Reishi knows that your gift, your strength, is the thing that makes you vital and alive.
To be clear: Reishi doesn’t care how you make your money. Your destiny may have nothing to do with how you pay your mortgage, but it has everything to do with how you feed your soul.
“We know what the world wants from us. We know we must decide whether to stay small, quiet, and uncomplicated or allow ourselves to grow as big, loud, and complex as we were made to be.”
Glennon Doyle Melton, Love Warrior
Exuberant Quietude
Passionflower
Passiflora incarnata
Passionflower is a study in opposites. She climbs vigorously (some say invasively), sending exploring fingers through fence slats and wall crevices. What’s over there? she wonders, always trying to get to the other side, to expand beyond her current boundaries. Even her flower exudes frenetic energy, vibrantly bursting out into the world.
Every inch of Passionflower is reaching, striving, and climbing. And yet . . . her Medicine is the magical calm that happens when the television, computer, and phone are all suddenly silent. She begs you to pause in your questing and take the time for a new experience: inner quietude. Why? Because being able to be quiet and still is Passionflower’s secret to exuberant expansion without stress or burnout.
Ritual
Feeling Expansive
Expand yourself, instructs Passionflower as she reaches around a flowerpot on her way to the far corner of the garden.
Are you ready to get a body sense of what it feels like to be calm and contained yet exuberantly expansive?
Stand in a doorway with your palms turned inward toward your body.
Press the backs of your hands against the doorframe.
Push outward with your arms as hard as you can (your muscles might shake a little; that’s okay) while counting slowly to 40. Then step out of the doorway . . .
(Just go do it! Passionflower says. She’s not giving away the ending and ruining your chance to explore for yourself.)
Reflection
Life Inventory
Passionflower teaches us the power of balance: doing and not doing, critical thinking and daydreaming, waking and sleeping. Her power is in doing all things with vigor, giving equal weight and zest to every activity, which is accomplished by keeping our thoughts centered in the present moment. Take a life inventory:
Which parts of your life do you feel joyously engaged with?
Have you lost your passion for some parts of your daily life?
Are you trudging through your work or family time?
Passionflower approaches everything with curiosity, even doing the dishes and bathing the dog. Passionflower doesn’t want you to jettison the mundane parts of your life; she knows that you need to water the plants and make the bed. Instead she wants you to attempt to bring simple joy and curiosity to all aspects of your day.
I have no special talents. I am only persistently curious.
Albert Einstein
Pay Attention!
Nettle
Urtica dioica
If we do not know the names of the plants around us, if we do not acknowledge the individualistic curl of a leaf or creep of a rhizome, they all run together and look like a wall of greenery. That’s when we humans start to generalize, lumping anything without a showy flower into the category of “Weed.” Nettle will have none of this. Pay attention! she admonishes. We’re all different, all unique. When you acknowledge Nettle’s individuality and treat her with thoughtful respect, she’ll let you close. But forget yourself and you won’t forget her sting. Nettle reminds you to see individuality and treat the world around you accordingly. If Nettle is pricking you, pause and pay greater attention!
Ritual
True Seeing
Nettle says, See me, and, really, isn’t that what each of us wants? To be seen and acknowledged?
Make this your ritual
today: See the people around you as unique individuals. Walk through the world with presence, acknowledging in your heart your family, the people with whom you work or study, the folks standing in line with you at the market. In your mind say two unique things about every person you meet. When you slip into your internal world, that place where other people become a bit blurry, consciously pull yourself back to being externally present. As you focus outward, imagine every cell in your body being aware of the details of life around you.
Reflection
Who Is Unseen?
Nettle Medicine is both vast and fundamental. She gifts us the building blocks needed not only for the human body but for healthy soil. Because she’s not showy or flashy, she’s not often grown in the garden and her sting pushes her to the outskirts of civilization. But once known, she is beloved.
Are there entire groups of people relegated to the outskirts of your consciousness?
Older folks often feel like they’re no longer seen as individuals, and whole groups of people are often lumped together under the title of their race, ethnicity, or affiliation.
Nettle asks, Who has become invisible to you? She reminds you of the gifts you’re missing when you stop seeing individuality.
You Are Sacred
Tulsi
Ocimum sanctum
Tulsi, also called Holy Basil, is traditionally planted in a special pot by the front door of homes in South Asia. This holiest of plants, thought of alternately as a household deity and a manifestation of the goddess Lakshmi, brings heaven to earth. Her spicy scent reminds you to be aware of the unseen, of spirit flowing in and out. Tulsi says, You’re strongest when you let spirit help you adapt to the ups and downs of daily life.
If you befriend Tulsi, she might give you a further message: your spirit flows through your physical form, and so your soul is fed through your body’s senses. You might wear Tulsi beads around your neck to remind you that you are the home for your spirit and you are sacred.
Ritual
Come Home to Yourself
Tulsi asks you to come home to yourself. We often look externally for the sacred while treating our own selves — our bodies, our inner knowings, our spirits — like so much flotsam on life’s current. Holy Basil knows that coming home to yourself is not something you do once but a practice to be repeated over and over. Her presence is your reminder: Come home.
Plant Tulsi in a pot by your door to remind you to carry blessings into the world and, upon your return, to take time to care for and nurture yourself.
No place for a potted plant? No worries! Instead, place a photograph or drawing of Tulsi near the doorway.
Hang Tulsi beads in such a way that they brush you, gently reminding you of her presence, every time you enter and leave your house. Carry the sacred out into the world and gift it to yourself upon your return. Come home, again and again.
Reflection
What If You Are Holy?
Tulsi’s benediction: What if you are holy, just as you are? What if you don’t need to be more “spiritual,” more kind, more anything?
What if you acknowledged yourself, just the way you already are, as a sacred being?
How would that thought shift who you are and how you show up in the world?
Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us. . . . Your playing small does not serve the world.
Marianne Williamson, A Return to Love
Let Magic In
Vervain
Verbena officinalis
Vervain whispers of enchantment and worlds not quite seen. She’ll teach you to see beyond the ordinary and help you explore the liminal lands of the psyche. Through her easy access to the in-between, she can call in the Medicine of plants not present, making her a must for any healer’s garden. Ask Vervain to channel her sisters and hold their place in a tea blend or incense. But remember, even though she is wispy, Vervain is powerful: a sip of her tea is magical, a cup nauseating. Why? Because too much mystery puts us off balance; think of it as motion sickness of the soul. So let Vervain dance lightly on the edges of your consciousness, reminding you of the infinite possibilities that unfold when you let magic in.
Ritual
Study the Interstitial
Celtic lore says the Druids harvested Vervain when neither the sun nor the moon was in the sky. These magical times occur almost daily: we call them dawn and dusk. Vervain’s Medicine is the Medicine of these interstitial times and of liminal places (doorways, crossroads, and the place where the sea foam curls onto the beach). The way to truly understand her is to hone your knowledge of the in-between.
When was the last time you truly took in those moments when night slips into day or day into night?
For three days, choose to observe the sunrise or sunset (or both). Carve out 10 minutes to stand under the sky, holding Vervain in your heart, as you absorb the magic of the in-between. If you have something weighing on your mind, be open to the possibility of unexpected answers.
Reflection
Standing at the Crossroads
The ancient mystics venerated the in-between and the interstitial as places where possibilities overlap, creating the perfect petri dish for synchronicity and magic. These places are often called crossroads because there, instead of continuing on your current path, you could choose to make a hard turn and explore the unknown.
In mythology, crossroads have a guardian, because major life changes often require the death of an old way of being and humans need guidance (or a trial!) to help them through this rite of passage. If you were standing at a crossroads today, what would you be willing to leave behind to take a new road?
Crossroads Guardians
Many cultures have a guide or guardian who stands at the crossroads.
Hecate is the Greek goddess of the night, the moon, and the crossroads.
Janus, the Roman god of endings and beginnings, has two faces, one turned toward the future, the other to the past.
Legba is the West African crossroads spirit who facilitates messages between people and the gods.
Cailleach, the Celtic Crone, is a gatekeeper to the spirit world.
Remembrance
Rosemary
Rosmarinus officinalis
Rosemary is the smell of déjà vu and the after-breath of nostalgia. Her gift is the faint scent that teases and vanishes, leaving you longing for something you can’t quite name, and with memories that crest and crash, pulling you gasping into their undertow.
In Victorian times Rosemary was said to say, “Remember me.” This is but a small part of her magic. Rosemary can ease remembrance, softening sharp edges, or she can dredge the distant past, pulling on your DNA to bring forward the longings of lineage. Crush the leaves. Hold them to your nose. The past is encoded into our cellular memory. Rosemary whispers, Sink into the knowledge that lives in your bones. Let memory rise up from the body of your being.
Ritual
Honoring Ancestral Memory
Rosemary’s magic lies in her scent and the volatile oil hidden in her leaves. Science has affirmed that the smell of Rosemary’s essential oil enhances memory. Here’s how it works: When you inhale Rosemary, her vaporous oils cross through the mucous membranes in your nose and enter your bloodstream. Recall is significantly improved with Rosemary flowing in your veins.
You can get a good whiff of rosemary by crushing fresh leaves between your fingers or by rubbing a drop of rosemary essential oil between your palms. Then hold your hands over your nose and inhale for a few minutes. Notice how you feel.
Remembering Your Lineage
Connect with your ancestral past through freewriting. Here’s how: Grab a notebook and set a timer for 10 minutes. Below is a prompt to start you writing. After you read it, begin writing and don't stop until your timer goes off.
I can almost guarantee that you’ll feel silly or lost or confused for at least the first 3
minutes. You’ll feel like you are making things up, or that you don’t know what to write. Keep writing. At a certain point your ego will step aside and that is when the magic happens!
Here’s your writing prompt: Dear (name of ancestor), I’m working to deepen my ancestral ties. Is there anything you’d like to share with me? Now start writing, answering in the voice of your ancestor.
Reflection
You Are Made of Memories
Rosemary whispers the memories of this lifetime, but she also reminds us of the kitchens of generations past and the scent of camphor mixing with sea air. Our DNA has traveled through millennia. When we think of memory, we focus on the people we ourselves have known — grandparents, great-aunts, cousins twice removed. Our thoughts tend to be based on personalities, experiences, likes or dislikes. Rosemary asks us to travel beyond those associations to feel for the memory that lives in the twisting threads of our chromosomes. This is what it means to honor our ancestors and to be rooted in our own history.