empathy for grief despite it all, is the biggest protest we can launch.

I’m sitting down to start this piece of writing, at the old Laundromat in the little town where I am living right now. It’s been weeks and I’ve really needed to wash my clothes, many of them stained with grass and thistle, or with multiple layers of mystery dirt from who knows where. A handful of items are covered in oils and beeswax from my week of salve and balm-making, a practice I haven’t done in this quantity for 2.5 years now. It’s a trip really, to revisit old recipes, labels and jars I once used, now using them again- and smells channeling what I imagined before would be a good combination of medicinal plants. Cleaning up after making salves is an ordeal, and I don’t imagine all my clothes will wash clean. Alas, it comes with the territory. Making medicine for days now, after a season of gathering herbs and brewing them in different menstruums, some of the concoction have been brewing since last year when I failed to do a shop update in the fall, due to my mental health at the time. So it’s been a bit of time coming, and it feels good to do some alchemy work— transforming this to that, in order to offer these bites of time and place to the world to be nourished by. In the meantime, my clothes get covered in possibly unextractable oil stains.

I have to stop and remind myself when I get hyper focused on something- it’s time to do some menial but helpful and uplifting self-care tasks. Like, washing clothes. Washing dishes. Taking out the compost and trash. Re-filling my water tank. Hanging up my clothes again in the closet after they have been tossed aside.

The smells of these medicines bring up grief for me. And grief as I write about it at this moment, I’m looking into as a thing over there that is it’s own being and I’m trying to make sense of it where I currently stand. I feel like I’ve cried almost every day for the last two years and in the last month or two, it has subsided for a bit, the all encompassing, immersive and downright paralyzing state that grief can put one in, that I have often been put it. Some days, it made everything I had planned to do when I was having a good day, seem virtually impossible. Many days, I could not eat. Others, I felt a sense of purposeless and deep loneliness I couldn’t shake and didn’t even have the motivation to channel it into what once were tools that worked for me— doing art, exercising, researching.

So after several months of ‘some’ cry-free days, today, I let it hit me again, I made myself take the day alone after so much socializing for weeks now, and with the smell of the Rosemary and Pine, the texture of tallow and shea butter, the deep yellow ochre color of the chaparral oil reflecting out of bottle labels I made out of my old slide-in camper truck surrounded by old-growth sagebrush and deep love for a land I am not allowed to go back to— I was hit with immense exhaustion. It could have been the 10-12 hour work days woven with trying to see friends visiting town, but it also was the suppressed grief from the many distractions I have had lately, welling up, in that almond-shaped place in the center of my chest, just down from my sternum. It popped and couldn’t hold back anymore. I took a nap and fell into a dream state, shifted into the visual origins of some of my deepest grief, and danced there in lucidity, a nap to quell my fatigue and to gear up to write here on Substack, a space I have been neglecting in all of the hubbub the last month or so. In that half dream state, all the stuff I had been setting aside came full front, it isn’t gone, it is just over there, and at any time it can come to full attention again. The longing, the emotional pain, they never go away.

I kept wondering, where do I even begin with my next published piece on here? Well, with Laundry, and grief, and shea butter. Laundry, funny enough, reminds me of being stranded at an RV park last fall, after being stranded in the Nevada desert, where I once fell in love. At the RV park where I kept myself busy while the transmission on my truck was getting fixed across the street, I did laundry. All the things I could possibly wash, I did. Curtains, sheets, old rags. I occupied myself with washing things.

Grief, at least, has been a familiar character in my writings for a bit now, it is found in the acute and monumental heartbreak I have felt in the last few years but also for many meandering years now I have written about the grief of the land’s loss of innocence, the loss of fertility and vibrance of the landscape I grew up in due to centuries of mono-crop agriculture, the grief associated with the loss of familial southern rituals, of community I once knew in different places, of the loss of human loved ones who took their lives, of deep true love that ran away, of the forest I would bike to as a kid, suddenly one day, cut down. I have written about all kinds of different levels of grief over the years. It’s always right there, on my heart, hanging off my body like an ornament. I’ve been celebrated for it when it hits a chord of convenience and nostalgia. I have been shunned and shamed for it when it is perceived as judgement, criticism, too much or inappropriate.

I’m often told that I’m ‘holding on’ too much but yet, our culture cannot function if we ‘hold on,’ so therefore it is a problem to be a vessel of feeling and interconnection. I accrued debt this past year because I could barely work, and my projects of many years, like the podcast, took some rest, and my ability to monetize to support the work and care about it, fell to the wayside. The grief was so consuming that it made it hard to do most things. It wasn’t that I was holding on, it held onto me. It reflected the immensity of love I had, and and have, and felt like an insult to be told, I shouldn’t hold on to something that held onto me. It still holds onto me and there’s nothing I can do about it. I moved the limbs I could when I could, but often I couldn’t do much. I managed to finally finish reading a book or two this summer, something that I could not also do in the throes of my grief, despite the fact that I am a researcher, an ever evolving learner and usually love to learn and read and explore ideas. I grieve losing the innocence associated with certain things I love, like these very herbal formulas I have been concocting in the metal confines of my airstream-cabin, because they remind me of loss, of pain, of trauma, of goodness taken away. Of innocence, the perception of innocence, wisked away in an instant. Of wanting to love a place, people, other beings but not at the expense of personal boundaries of self-respect and self-love. It all ‘reminds’ me of the memories I hold, triggered just like that from the texture or the scent or the color.

I’m preparing to teach a 1.5 hour online class this Tuesday evening called ‘Plants + Grief’ and in some ways I feel ill-prepared. How much could one actually fit in 1.5 hours on just a vast and sensitive topic? I’ve been holding lots of pieces lately, and being the Virgo rising that I am— so detailed oriented to the point of never living up to my own expectations of details needed to make the ‘thing’ good, and so I worry I won’t be ready enough. It’s an edge for me to offer something that isn’t just ‘information about plants and history and botany’ to the wider world, but after a summer of teaching in person, I’m realizing how vital it is to not ignore grief when learning of our lost botanical lineages. How can we learn about land at all without sitting with what it means to lose all you love? So in some ways, I feel overly prepared in that grief has been my only constant for the last while. It has had me in panic attacks, kept me up in snow storms and full moons in anxiety and tears and flashbacks, curled in a ball in the corners I could find to tuck into where somehow the small spaces could keep my wails from bouncing down the valley. I have danced with the darkest depths of the grief monster, and at any moment it could come back in a big welling, it only takes one seed, glimpse, or smell to drag me back down, and well it’s ok.

I’ve been hearing a lot in my social sphere lately of others who are experiencing being guilted for being in grief. Not being ‘love and light enough.’ And friends of friends using it against other friends for being ‘down sometimes’ or having had experienced immense trauma that wasn’t their fault. And since I experienced both people who embraced me fully in my grief the past two years and folks who held it against me or told me I was too much because of my constant spinning and cycling and wailing madness, I can really empathize with what it must feel like to be shamed for being paralyzed by grief. To be gaslit by a society that HAS to in order to keep functioning the way it does. I think others don’t realize how much telling people their grief is too much for the world actually makes the grief worse. We all want to be loved, and to be told that we aren’t lovable now, is a reflection of a common cultural pattern of discomfort with grief because to be friends with it, familiar with it, and not scared of it, means to reject core aspects of our society and a world that overwhelmingly delivers us a different message. To not feel to work on, churn on, combust on, eat and be eaten in the worst way.

In my last convo on the podcast (and more coming soon when I can take a breath!) with Calyx Liddick, she mentions the liberal political philosophy of John Locke as an overwhelming influence on how we see ‘nature’ and ourselves, and it was nice to be reminded of his work, after reading his writings in college when I was getting my Philosophy and Religions degrees. These degrees require a lot of reading of the ‘classics,’ and at my school in my department, I got a lot of leeway to venture out of the classics with support from rad professors (one I walked the Camino de Santiago with and got to see this past summer on the CDT). His work greatly influenced political theory and philosophy that has trickled to our society today and the laws that govern the infrastructure of our lives. It also influenced Western understanding of the ‘self’ as we know it today and what it means to have ‘rights’ as an individual despite the fact that he financially was invested in the enslavement of African folks and even supported laws that solidified the legality of slaveowner’s rights while on paper saying he was against slavery, a contradiction that still trickles into politics today. He advocated for revolution and yet also the necessity of the government as some kind of god-ordained entity. Aspects of his work were controversial in its day, like advocating for religious tolerance. His work paved the way for how we understand capitalism and the value of money as a mode of exchange. Though, he may have not been able to imagine how it evolved to be what it is today, and may not have approved of its evolution. He is famous for his ideas that as humans we are a blank slate when born, a tabla rasa, and that reality should be rooted in a materialist influence.

His ideas alongside Descartes mind-spirit dualism split, were influential in the evolution of a society that had the capacity to to take the spirit out of the body, the land and the object.

In order for capitalism to function, our bodies have to become less alive, and more like a mechanic part. And if the mind and body are split and can be, than the body does not contain the same sacredness as possible in spirit which is out there, up there or somewhere far away. SO much of our world is influenced by this: like ecosystem ‘functions’ and ‘performance’ and ‘stability.’ And of course, plenty of other compartmentalizations are happening everywhere from our specialized jobs to botanical nomenclature to spreadsheets breaking down every cent in the cost of how a thing transpires. How do we really LIVE, in an infrastructure that doesn’t give us easy choice to opt out of commodifying each other or time itself?

Even noticing lately, with time as money, or money and people and place, how much property owners vs. tenants power dynamics end up disrupting friendships or partnerships, end up having us see one another as a means to an end, a cog in a wheel, a source of money, or as a ‘resource’ to use and not a full human. That even though we all are living in a world where this system is in place, some can subject others more to it, just to simply have a place to be safe and sleep. And grief has no place here, for some, what is one needs a safe place to be in grief for awhile? Does it disrupt ones Edenist hopes for community, harmony and homestead? Or productivity, efficiency and time management?

I say there is no community, and no true friendship and love without an embracing of one another’s grief. And, that we should support one another in feeling what we need to feel in order to actually heal from the experiences we’ve had in life. Requiring an exorbitant amount of time or money from someone just to park their rickety truck they sleep in or tent they pop up or RV they live in — seems contradictory to me, for example. If land wasn’t so expensive now, and the cost of living, would we be doing this to one another? If there wasn’t scarcity mentality, a big product of capitalism, would we be so obsessed with seeing how we can extract from one another? Maybe we still would. It’s not all about money. It’s not all about what someone can do for you. But certainly I have seen this year how much people see this way, and how naive I can be to it all at my own expense.

I grieve a world I have never known, where money doesn’t exist and we don’t have to see one another as mechanized parts. And yet, here we are, trying to find a balance somewhere. Fairness is possible somewhere in the play between worlds. And, empathy for grief despite it all, is the biggest protest we can launch.

The Plants + Grief class sign ups are wrapping up as we meet in a couple days, but I do have a few other classes happening this fall online.

You can check out the others’ here.

If you happen to be in western Colorado this coming weekend, I will be teaching dogbane cordage and cordage ethnobotany at Forest and Field, the gathering I’m making all these salves and elixirs for! There will be free music at night.

More sharing from the adventures I’ve had the past two months, stay tuned.