Scandelous dandelion, virginal rose image from One More Soul, a website reportedly dedicated to “fostering God’s plan for love, chastity, marriage, and children.”

This image, I have to admit, almost leaves me speechless.  My first thought was to note the amazing feats of illogic.  How, for example, does the use of contraception lead to single-parent homes?  Contraception – by definition – prevents you from becoming a parent in the first place.  And why is contraception the root of (dum dum DUM) “Sexual Chaos“?  I mean, in my experience contraception generally requires some ability to think ahead, and planning isn’t an activity I’d call chaotic.

But true to form, I’m more interested in the choice of flowers.  I’m not going to dis the chastity rose (although I’m not sure any sort of flower is especially chaste…plants in general are awfully good at getting it on), even though it’s not much like the wild Rosa rugosas that I love best.  But a dandelion?  What substances were these people taking that made them think that the roots of a dandelion – one of our most successfully prolific plants – made a good symbol for contraception?

I suspect the logic went something like: Dandelions=Weeds. Weeds=Bad.
Contraception=Bad.
Dandelions=Contraception.
Sigh.

Dandelions are adaptable.  Dandelions are scrappy and resilient.  Dandelions are crazy-good medicine.   Dandelions are generous:  We mow them down and pull them up and spray them dead, and no matter how often or how shortsightedly we reject them they keep coming back, stronger than ever.  Dandelions stand their ground.  They’re independent and sturdy, not to mention cheerful and cheering.

No matter how we vilify them, dandelions pop up in the ugly cracks and crevices and make those places more beautiful.  This graphic is bizarre and in some ways very ugly, and so maybe it’s only to be expected that a dandelion found its way into it.

I’m totally down with roses, and I’m totally down with loving families of all shapes and sizes and styles.  But when someone compares my choices to a dandelion (and yes, I do use contraceptives) I take that as high praise.  So my second thought when I saw this poster was, “I’m a dandelion!  Yay!”

On this glorious spring day, I’m raising a toast to the dandelion. Will you join me?

(Click to buy local.)

I’m giving a great big virtual cheer that The Wild Medicine Solution: Healing with Aromatic, Bitter, and Tonic Plants has been published and is on my shelf. I’ve been anticipating this since I first heard last May that Guido Masé – clinical herbalist, cofounder of the Vermont Center for Integrative Herbalism, part of the team at Urban Moonshine, etc. – was writing a book. It’s even better than I’d hoped.  Why?

• It presents a system for using herbs in daily life that’s so accessible it goes beyond simplicity into elegance.
• Guido both speaks hard science and can translate it for laypeople.
• Storytelling is a skill near and dear to my heart, and Guido uses storytelling to great effect to both illustrate the uses of herbs and to communicate how powerful these plants are – physiologically, spiritually, and culturally.
• The recipes included are easy and delicious.  I’m particularly enamored of the hot chocolate recipe, which tastes smoothly bitter and rich, everything I’ve always wanted coffee and Guinness and hot chocolate to taste like.
• The herbs that Guido focuses on are easy to find and generally very pleasant to take: Think chocolate, ginger, and peppermint.
• The photos are gorgeous.
• While many books on natural health can leave you feeling like you’re fighting a losing battle (as though to be healthy, you must rid your home of every molecule of plastic, drink only spring water newly burst from the earth, eat tons of fish, never eat any fish because they’re all contaminated, and spend every waking hour doing mindfulness exercises), The Wild Medicine Solution is inspiring.  You come away from this book feeling that your body is strong and resilient, and can deal with the challenges of modern life if only you give it the right tools.

The upshot: If you have to deal with the stress and stressors of modern life, please read this. Accessible to non-science geeks and very appealing to those who like some soul served up with their science, this book is also a good one for skeptics who want scientific proof before they’ll buy into the validity of using herbs.

If you still have doubts, you should wander on over to The Wild Medicine Solution page on Guido’s blog:  You’ll find that this book is also recommended by David Winston, Susun Weed, David Hoffman, Michael Tierra, and others, including Rosemary Gladstar, who said:

“I have a new favorite book in my herbal library. What is most masterful about Guido’s teachings and writing is the way he weaves folklore, tradition, and science flawlessly together, making a sensible cohesive argument for the daily use of these common and important plants. Guido has written a classic.”

Hear, hear.

I posted earlier in the fall about how I tried growing some of my own herbs this year, but came up against an unexpected roadblock (in the form of contaminated compost).  Luckily, I have some pretty awesome sources for herbs:

My cat quickly decided that this bag from Zack Woods was hers.  The catnip (which had been in a plastic bag inside the paper bag) was so yummy and fragrant that she played with the empty paper bag for days.

For dried herbs, my first stop is, without a doubt, Zack Woods Herb Farm of Hyde Park, Vermont.  These wonderful people grow, harvest, and dry herbs so full of life that it seems you can still smell the summer breezes and the warm earth when you open up a jar of their herbs.  Anything I can get from Zack Woods, I do.  While I would love to have gotten to work with more fresh herbs from my own garden this year, I really feel that anything I make with Zack Woods herbs is vibrant and nourishing.

My other go-to business for dried herbs is Mountain Rose.  While this company isn’t local to me, they are pretty awesome, and provide a lot of info about their herbs, which are all either organically cultivated or wildcrafted.  From everything I’ve heard, they’re really good people.

I was lucky to win some Urban Moonshine bitters from Mountain Rose earlier this year!

For extracts, my original favorite – the company whose products made me realize just how much more fun it is to sip herbal extracts than it is to swallow capsules – is Urban Moonshine.  This company is local and run by awesome people, who you can “meet” in this video.  I’ve found their bitters and tonics to be extremely effective – not to mention delicious.  As an added bonus, their packaging is really cool, which means that a bottle of Urban Moonshine makes a hip hostess gift.  Far from the grannies of ages past who would pinch your nose until you swallowed your medicine, Urban Moonshine makes it fun to take their tinctures, and there are all sorts of recipes for cocktails and other tasty beverages.  While I love formulating my own extracts, I also always keep some Urban Moonshine bitters and tonics on hand.  They’re great go-to formulas, add wonderful flavors to drinks, and – thanks to their beautiful packaging and general yumminess – are perfect for introducing newbies to the world of herbal extracts.

So, while I haven’t gotten to experiment as much as I’d like with making herbal preparations from seed to sip, I’m grateful to know some wonderful people who do good work.  I feel that buying from people I genuinely like, whose work I respect and trust, is the next best thing to doing it yourself.

Thank you to Pagan Blog Prompts, where “Who Makes Your Tools?” asks, “When it comes to the tools of your practice, does it matter who made them or where they come from? Does something you made yourself have more power?” for the inspiration for this post!

The owner, Michael Keaney, is very gracious and has taken on the massive project of restoring Castle Ellen.  Michael opens the property to visitors in the summer, and I’d highly recommend a visit.  You can find out more here.

You can also learn something about Castle Ellen’s history – and see Michael and Castle Ellen on film – in this very interesting program from TG4, Ireland’s Irish-language TV station.  (Don’t worry!  It’s subtitled.)

I was on FB the other day when I noticed a friend’s status update.  He had postulated that the US is lacking in jobs because big companies have outsourced them to countries with cheaper labor.  Big Boxmarts buy the cheaper products that were made by folks in far-off places, and small local vendors just can’t compete.  Consumers buy from box-marts because they don’t want to pay for quality goods made by their neighbors when they can get cheap stuff made by underpayed labor abroad.  And so, the money we spend goes partly to those folks in far-off places, but mostly up the corporate ladder.  Because we buy cheap instead of buying local.

Take a lesson from Juno: Patronize your patrons.

This all sounds pretty depressing, but it isn’t, because the opposite could be true:  We could buy local instead of cheap.  We might not be able to buy as much, and we might have to transition little by little, but we’ll be part of an upward spiral instead of a downward one.  Our purchases will go toward our neighbor’s paychecks, and when those neighbors buy local too, local businesses will thrive.  Then they’ll hire.  Unemployment will go down and meaningful employment will go up.  You know what else?  Small businesses are innovative.  Some of those exciting new ideas will create products that go beyond the local market, beyond the national market.  Soon, we’re making stuff the rest of the world wants, and money starts flowing into our town/state/region/country instead of out.

When the economy crashed, the government handed out stimulus money and hoped we’d spend it.  My only expertise is as an observer, but it seems to me that the problem isn’t that people aren’t spending:  It’s that they’re spending in all the wrong places.  I think choosing to shop local and independent can go a long way towards saving the world.

This is when most people object that buying local is expensive.  It can be, but it doesn’t have to be, and I say that from experience.  Keep an eye out for “Local on a Budget” posts.  Everyone can afford to buy local, and I’m going to tell you how.

In the meantime, here are some great resources for finding local and independent businesses this holiday season:
your local Local First organization
Indie Store Finder
Shop Small (a campaign by AmEx, which is not a small local company, but still a good resource)
Etsy
Storenvy
PoppySwap
Local Harvest

This last spring I planned for some fairly ambitious container gardening, which unfortunately came to naught.  The mustard thrived, and the roses survived just fine, but most of the seedlings just stopped growing and the poor tomatoes looked like they were being tortured.  It turned out the compost I’d purchased had been contaminated with some nasty persistent herbicides.  It was heartbreaking, but still, I’m lucky to have a source for stunningly vibrant dried herbs (Zack Woods Herb Farm, here in Vermont), and so I was able to order lemon balm, and tulsi, and angelica among other good things.  They’re all tucked into mason jars in alphabetical order on my shelf, ready to get me and others through the winter and remind us of greener times when things were growing.

I was also lucky enough to complete Rosemary Gladstar‘s Advanced Herbal Studies program this year.  We began in May, and that first Friday as I came over the hill into Orange, VT, it was like driving right into a cloud.  We experienced all four seasons through the program – even, during the last weekend in October, a bit of winter with snow that stayed on the ground and temperatures solidly below freezing one night.  (Since I was camping, I was distinctly aware of those temperatures!)  The last Sunday, as we each stood up to receive our certificates and congratulations from our teachers, another cloud enveloped Sage Mountain, recalling our first day there.  Of course, then the mountain and roadsides and our gardens were swelling with new growth, whereas now each frost seems to trim back what greenery is left.  It’s time to tuck in for the winter, to rest more, to hunker down and reflect on the year.  After six weekends (one each month) packed full of invaluable herbal information and inspiration, I felt (and feel) that I have a lot to reflect on, so it wasn’t so sad to leave, that afternoon, as I’d expected it would be.

As much as I’ll miss the sunshine and long afternoons stretched out in the summer heat (I could have used a few more of those, really…), I’m content to be moving into darker days of rest and reflection.  One song has it that “summer’s a lover who always leaves before it’s the right time to go,” but this year, after something of a breathless summer, I’m ready for the exhalation that winter brings.

This post is inspired by the prompt “What have you harvested this year? How are you saving your harvest so that it lasts through the winter? What other preparations are you making before the snow falls?” over at paganprompts.blogspot.com .

I’m far overdue in posting about this book, which has been out since the spring.  This is the newest from Rosemary Gladstar – an inspiring herbalist who I’ve been lucky enough to study with, and one of my absolute favorite herbal authors.  Rosemary Gladstar’s Medicinal Herbs is an ideal book for the beginning herbalist.  It starts out with easy-to-follow instructions on growing and using herbs, and continues with profiles of 33 easy to use and easy to find herbs.  Having read this book – written in Rosemary’s friendly and inviting style – I think even the most tentative students of herbalism will be inspired to dive in and start gardening and harvesting, concocting and decocting. I’d also recommend this for more experienced herbalists – in large part because this book focuses on some of the herbs that are so widely available that it’s easy to forget they’re also medicinal.  This is a gorgeously designed book that’s a pleasure to own and use.

I thought we really had something.  When I first met you, you were healthy and full of life.  I loved contemplating the lake and sitting under the shade of your tall trees.  Walking from Merchant’s to Camp, I’d end up out of breath and then collapse into my tent, and sleep like I never sleep away from you.  Even the noise from the road took on the quality of waves, or breath.

We celebrated Pennsic together.  You introduced me to a lot of your friends, who have become dear friends of mine.  I met Logan at the intersection of Free Will and Good Intentions.  I have a lot to thank you for, Cooper’s, and not just for two weeks a year.

I thought it would last forever.

But Cooper’s, now I hear you’ve been thinking about fracking around on me.  You’ve even signed some sort of agreement to frack on your grounds, under the trees where the woods battles used to be held.  When I heard, I was livid.  You say you’ll use protection.  You say you’ll get tested.  But don’t you know you’re endangering your own health as well as mine?

Here in Vermont, they’ve banned fracking.  Say what you like about our relationships with trees, but we’re not prudes.  It’s even legal to walk around naked in public!  Just so long as you’re not being lewd or lascivious – or fracking.

I’ve loved you for ten years now, Cooper’s.  I’m not going to break up with you via blog.  I’ll come back just once, to say goodbye.  But once you and your new buddies have fracked, it’s over.

Kristen

PS:  I hope we can find a new home for Pennsic.  You say you don’t understand why you should give up custody, but I think Pennsic deserves to be somewhere healthy, with fresh air and water.  Your fracking is a bad influence.