Is there a healer in there?

Peering into a sun soaked jar of the last of the green medicine from the garden, my overgrown toddler asks, “is there a healer in there?”

This is one of those great questions that only new people can conjure, one that silences me and opens me all at once. I’m finally smart enough to know not to try to answer these kinds of questions and let the spinning earth do the talking. I sit quietly for a breath or two, letting the question fill the space. Finally, the small one looks up and we see each other deeply for a wisp of a moment, letting the question land on each other.

Much later, after dinner and pillow fights and negotiations about pajamas, I lean back into that question and wonder, is there a healer in here, now? If not now, when today did I engage the healing energy that seems to be the innate force of anything and everything that strives for life? I think back to the messy parenting moments and feelings of overwhelm and know that my healer was m.i.a. (without adding guilt or shame to that observation). Then, I remember the moments where I scooped up a kid who was on their way towards tantrum, heard the cat crying for food and responded, looked out and witnessed the cooper’s hawk gliding low over the field. With each of these intertwined moments, I see that healing is never directional but cyclical, like the breath. In taking care of the old cat, I inhaled the flight of the hawk, like medicine. In taking in the hawk, I had a slightly bigger bandwidth to see a fragile child and intervene with love. The pulse of energy is ever-flowing and present, but being awake, curious, and aware seems to be the magic that engages the healer.

A few days later, when I check on the dried, aromatic mugwort macerating in almond oil, the smell reaches into my brain, wraps around my womb, and softens my heart. then the aha moment comes: “there is nothing but healers in here!” There is no other energy to engage with, as a plant, than the energy of life. Upwards and outward and downward - always - even now. With empty limbs and grey stalks the landscape heaves life force down, caressing the Earth’s crust until it yields in embrace. Healing emerges in the directional shift of moving towards life.

I wonder how it would feel to have roots spreading along my skin: like a tickle, spreading smiles? Like a soft, arousing kiss?

The plants know something so completely simple yet so vast, it’s hard to put a name to it for myself. But when I look out with delight at the free flying hawk, or sneak in to curl around my sleeping child, I know completely what it is the plants know. It’s love. Just simply (profoundly), love. They reach out in every direction with it, true healers every single one. Plants celebrate the perfect union they make out of the interdependent elements of earth and sky, fire and air. It’s divinely erotic out there….

And from that union, we emerge, are nourished and fed, and supported in our own amazing ability to heal and be well. It’s like coming home to safe, loving arms. With this image in mind, enveloped by the plants, I wish us all deep healing this winter.