Ten Tips for Harvesting Herbs

I'm deep into harvest time.

Usually we think of late summer and fall as the harvest season around here.  That's when tomatoes are ripe on the vine and if you're into that sort of thing, the canning jars and dehydrators come out for the preserving of produce for the winter.

violets

But we often forget that there are other harvests to be had when you are talking about herbs.  So far I've harvested violet blossoms for tea and incense.  Motherwort was just beginning to send up flower stalks, which signaled to me that it was time for that to be cut and dried as well.  The comfrey is looking ready for harvesting too.

Jury-rigged Solar Dehydrator with Motherwort

In many northern European traditions Midsummer is the height of the herb harvest seasons.  There are many stories about the magical properties of the herbs harvested on the night before or that day. That's because the potency of many herbs is at its height just before they flower which often happens in June or July. From my own experience here a couple of rules of thumb about harvesting herbs:

1. Harvest leaves before the plant flowers. (watch for plants getting tall and leggy or flower buds)
2. Harvest flowers when they smell fragrant.
3. Harvest roots after a frost in the fall.
4. Always make sure that you have properly identified your plant.
5. Never harvest all of the plants unless you plan to replant it or you grew it yourself.
6. Dry flowers with a low temperature, in a warm oven or in the sun.
7. Leaves can be dried at a higher temperature like an oven at 250 degrees.
8. For oil extraction use canola oil, it's cheap and won't go rancid.
9. Try to time your harvest so that you have all the time you need to process and store the herb right after you harvest it.
10. Label what you harvest. It's surprisingly hard to tell one green leafed dried thing from another.

And just for fun, I wanted to share this cool video about a community in Italy where they've discovered how to let plants sing!

New Music, New Techniques, New Start.

New projects in the making:

Organic plant dyed cotton and recycled leather

recycled silk and embroidery

Organic plant dyed cotton

I've been experimenting with plant dying and loving it!  All these and more will be up in my etsy store soon.  I'm also looking forward to sharing some new techniques with you all.  I recently was gifted with some woad which is really really exciting for me!  To dye with it you have to change the chemical structure of the dye.  I'm going to be doing this with a urine bath.  This is an ancient method, going back at least centuries.  The resulting blue is lightfast, durable and beautiful.

I'm also starting on some new linocut prints, and hopefully in a week or two I will finally get to do a print run again for the first time in over a year!  You can find some of my work here and here.

And in the mood of new, here's my new favorite band:

After Imbolc

A couple of days ago I heard the bird song change. The winter song they sing is thin and small. It's as if they can barely bring themselves to sing in the dawn.  This week it changed.  The birds know more than we do.  They are ancient beings, descendants of the giant lizards that roamed the earth so long ago.  A couple of days ago, I went outside in the morning to sing with them, like I do every morning.  The air was full of song!  

There was such joy in their music that I knew then more surely than through any calendar date that the shift to warmer days had begun.  So we sang in the dawn together, the birds and I and I felt their joy in my own heart.  Though the ice yet abides on the ground  I know soon enough I will smell the sweet smell of warm earth and sun.

It's moments like that that keep me going.  When I wonder why I am doing this strange thing I remember singing with the birds and I am content.  I thought I would share a morning prayer with you.

Morning Prayer:

I call out to the Gods and Spirits

Aid me to keep my oaths, that I might walk this journey of life with pride and honor. 

Aid me to see the beauty in my own life and in others lives.

Aid me to find joy in my heart, wisdom in my head and good work in my hands.

Blessed be.

Ritual Creates Community

Ritual is a mixed media art form.

It is a combination of word and song, smell and sight to create a sense of the extraordinary.  Or maybe more accurately it is to create a heightened sense of what the ordinary really is. To vault the ordinary into the sacred, or to notice that it was already there.  Emotional sleight of hand if you will.

We can do this by ourselves and it can be a powerful experience.  A feather that was a gift, a twig from a special tree.  All the little things we used to collect as children.  Those wonderful treasures that life gives us can form the core of something that has great meaning and brings us peace and tranquility.  But that feather only means so much to you, and maybe to the person who gave it to you.  To me the greater challenge is to learn to speak a symbolic language that others can understand.

Ritual with others is a form of collaborative art.

It takes the same sort of sacredness that we might discover on our own, sitting in front of a candle in a darkened room and casts the shadow of that fire large upon the wall.  Everything is bigger, more complicated and also less personal.

Beltane Maypole

This weekend I will be leading an ADF style Druidic rite at Convocation in a room full of strangers.  There will be people there collaborating with me.  We've been emailing furiously for a couple of weeks now, ironing out all the details and necessary items for our semi-improvizational ceremonial theatre.  I have meditated, written, edited, and researched in order to create this upcoming moment.

Why do group ritual at all, let alone have ceremonies where complete strangers participate?  Why go through all this work and preparation, for about an hour of time?

Because the gain outweighs the risk.

Midsummer Night

It outweighs the work and the research.  It's all worth it and I'll tell you why.

Community.

One word that can mean so many things.  In my mind it evokes images of tidy neighborhoods, of schools and boring City Hall meetings.   But it also evokes a more powerful image.  I see a moment in time where people come together and do something wonderful.  They reach out to each other and for a little while they put off from themselves the chores and failures, the struggles and successes of the daily world. They are fearless because they are with each other.  They might sing, or chant, or move together and if you're very very lucky, there will come a moment when the boundaries of self lift away and the only word that applies is We.  We sang, we danced, we felt as one not only with each other, but with the world around us.  We came in contact with that elusive moment of the sacred. Together we felt the transcendent touch of the divine.

That's what makes our community worth something.  That's what gives it power and strength.

So I've spent the last couple of days working on cutting out fabric and refining my words. I gathered my tools and packed my bags.    My husband took on extra work at home so I'd have time.  He's watching the kids while I run off to play Druid with my friends.  It's so worth it.  Wish us luck, we're playing with magic.

Creating Art as a Spiritual Practice

I've found out that painting is a difficult thing.  It tires me physically and emotionally.  I've only been at it seriously for a month now.

I've set aside one day a week for my painting.  I'm delving into my art in a way I've never had the discipline and will to do before.  I've had the time, I've even had times where I had more money than I do now to throw at it.  I've found something out:

The creation of art is less to do with time and money and more to do with compassion and the ability to keep a practice of discipline. 

Sounding pretty Zen isn't it?

I know the methods of increasing my skills.  Gestural drawings,  using a mirror, careful draftsmanship, modeling and shading, and perspective are all in my box of tools.  I can read books that tell me how to improve any of these.  But what about the moment when I've redrawn a hand seven times and it's not right?  That painful feeling of failure and inadequacy that comes with the realization that it's still not good enough?

That's where the compassion comes in.

Lots of world religions talk about compassion, but what is it?  One definition that I liked was:  "a feeling of deep sympathy and sorrow for another who is stricken by misfortune, accompanied by a strong desire to alleviate the suffering."

I might put it a little differently:

The ability to empathize with pain and sorrow while not allowing oneself to be incapacitated by that sorrow.


I really think that if people allow themselves to feel the pain that something causes, they will naturally want to alleviate it.  It's the ability to feel that pain honestly and without judgement that leads to action.  But you know what?  Allowing yourself to feel pain is hard.  It's even harder when you're causing your own pain and frustration.

Not getting caught in a self depreciating loop.
Not giving up.
Not losing hope.







Just admitting honestly that it's going to take at least one more time to get that damn hand to look the way I want it to look.  Feeling my own pain and not allowing myself to be stalled in my work.  Picking up my kneaded eraser and carefully and methodically destroying the result of my labor so that I can pick up that pencil and try again and get it right this time.

Maybe Rembrandt or DaVinci didn't have that problem.  Maybe everything came out perfectly the first time for them.  I doubt it thought.

Rembrandt

He looks a little haunted doesn't he?

So in the coming weeks I hope to share with you some of the practices I've explored in order to have greater compassion for my own artistic endeavors.  Here's a prayer that has helped me:

Fear, She digs deep to find my heart.

Pain, She also does her part.

Hold that moment, find Their wisdom.

Love them both and let it flow.

Breath in deep and let it go.

Take up my tools and in the stillness,  

restart.

Religious Ritual as an Art Form

As a pagan, ritual is my way of connecting with the greater powers, my way of meditating, of communing.  It is a form of prayer and also a form of art.  One of the things I love about creating ritual is how it combines different forms of artistic expression.  Of course there's the verbal arts: song, poetry, and invocation woven together to create the framework for the process.  But there's also movement and the visual arts adding substance and depth to the words.  The lighting of a candle can be a creative as well as a magical act.  The arrangement and choice of ritual implements is the act of an artist.  A beautiful handcrafted bowl, a found feather,  a painting or image of a deity or an ancestor all come together to create an embodied symbolism that surrounds the ritualist and participants.  

It's so easy to look down on embodied spirituality.  Buddhism tells us that this world is an illusion,  that only by letting go can we be happy.  Christianity tells us that we must embrace Christ in our hearts, that this world is a proving ground for the final immaterial world.  So often it seems to me like we're running away, trying to escape the embodied reality that we're living in, but I want to celebrate it! 

I am this body. I am this world.  It is inescapable that I am a creation of cells and chemicals: a piece of this earth that moves and feels.  I honor this body and the body of the earth because I see that which is made of real stuff as sacred.  Soil is sacred. My desk is sacred.  My scarred, flawed body is sacred.  It's the noticing it that's the trick and that's exactly what ritual allows us to do. It's about attending to the material, paying attention to the physical.   

Ritual is a doing phenomenon.  It doesn't do any good to read a book about it, or think about it.  It works when we actually interact with the world around us.  When we light a candle and say a prayer.  When we invite our ancestors to share our food or pour milk on our doorstep for the nature spirits we are interacting with the material world and the power within it. 

Ritual takes this one place, right here, wherever we are and says, "Here.  Right here it's special.  This place, this time, is awesome and full of wonder and beauty and power."

Wandering in Wordlessness

Moonlit Night(In Progress) by Melissa Hill

I don't have a fancy word this year. Last year my word was Grow and the year before that it was Incite. I don't know if I really did grow or not. I did a lot of things. I helped my kids continue to grow. I helped my garden to grow, and worked on Three Brothers Farm. Definitely helped things grow there. I worked hard on my clergy training for ADF and completed a number of classes in working toward my goals there.

Did I grow?

I suppose I did.  But not in the ways I expected to. I learned a lot about humility and love.   I learned about living with not knowing what's going to happen next in my life.  I learned a lot about letting go of control and how futile it is to think we have much control over anything at all.

I learned that sometimes I can't even control my own internal state. My feelings aren't mine to control.  Sometimes the only thing you can do is control your actions.

I grew older.  I plucked one or two white hairs out of my head.  That's not really what I had in mind either.

Bear Sketch

This year I really can't think of one word.  Maybe I'm getting wordy as I age.

This year I promised myself to give this artist thing a real fair shake. To become a professional.  To explore marketing, branding, and how to make money with this art thing I do. I am setting aside one day a week just for my art.  Painting, printing, sketching,  but always with the focus of turning out finished work.   Today was my first day on the job.

I had three panic attacks.

It's okay, I breathed through it. I'm pretty used to that sort of thing.  Things that I really want scare me.

Breath in, 1...2...3...4.  Hold 1...2...3...4.  Breathe out 1...2...3...4. Hold 1...2...3...4.

It works really well.  If you're prone to feeling panic, you should try it.  But practice when you're not panicked first.  It's best if you remember to do it every day, maybe after you brush your teeth, or during your lunch break.  That's how I started. I worked at EDS telling people to reboot their computers and I practiced breathing during my lunch break.

So here I go, wordy and wordless all at the same time.  Wish me luck.

Cosmos Turning by Melissa Hill