What the Plants Often Tell Me
The plants love us, but are really tired of how we treat them.
I feel this over and over from the plants when I sit with them.
They’re so relieved when I approach them with care, honor, and respect. They’re so relieved when I help tend the ecosystem, pick up trash, and offer them love from my heart.
They tell me, over and over again, how much they love us.
And also, that it’s devastating to them how we treat them. How much we’ve lost our way.
How disconnected we are from the wholeness of Earth, and ourselves, to treat the more-than-human world this way.
Part of my biggest passion in life is to help shift our consciousness from one of domination of the Earth to one of reciprocity and respect.
Through seasonal communion, plant medicine, energy attunement, and embodied wisdom, we can have the tools to spiral back towards ourselves and our true place within the web of life.
The place where we humans care for and tend the land. The place where we humans know that the ecosystem’s thriving is our own thriving.
When we form relationship with the Earth, via the seasons, plants, or elements of nature, we transform our own inner way of being and belonging to ourselves and the earth.
This is why I do what I do.
And I’m so happy you’re here alongside me, for I feel you must want this too.
It’s nettle season. And that means a lot of people are out wildcrafting.
I see so many people harvesting the nettle plant and leaving a long stem that the plant then has to “die back.” (see image on the left below).
This first image shows what I often find, left from other people's harvests. This person left a substantial part of the stem, that Nettle then has to do something about, and it stresses the plant out more than needed. (What I do like about this harvest, though, is they only took the top few leaves and left a good amount of the plant left to regrow.)
If we simply cut a little further down the stem, just above the leaf node (not on or through the leaf node!), where the plant then sprouts new leaves, it doesn’t have to work as hard to adjust to our harvest. (see image on right).
The plants aren’t just medicine “for us.” They are wise, sentient elders who have lives of their own, and deserve our respect.
May we and the plants become partners again in walking the healing path of awakening.
When I was harvesting Nettle this year, I asked what she wanted in return for my gathering of her medicine. She asked that I offer a class on respectful and ethical ways to harvest plants. I decided to make it free because this info is so important!
You just have to become a free member of The Golden Stone Wisdom School's Mighty Network to watch the recording.
