Folkways
I grow Santolina just for the smell, so I can brush by and release the fragrance and smell it with my ancestral nose, stirring something familiar. It makes me feel a ‘powerful tugging’ connecting to a past I’ll never know. Some details might arrive in a dream, or maybe they won’t…but the feeling is so strong there is something more here.
Santolina, green form, with sage
A powerful tugging…the way my grandmother’s button collection smells…I can bury my nose in it and *be there* beside her, hearing her, feeling her. In this same way we can connect with ancestors we’ve never met through specific plant smells.
The plants are also our relatives. Their growth patterns and movements on the earth were shaped by our ancestor’s interactions with them, and their plant bodies become our bodies when we eat, drink, inhale them (or rub them into our skin), as they became part of those who came before us.
Lemon and Rue are living by the backdoor with thyme and rosemary, all from my mediterranean ancestry. They feel like family members, sentient beings, who are guarding the door. They are known to be cleansing plants, both physically and energetically. Studies and tests in laboratories have proven what folk medicine already knows, that the essential oils, and other constituents from these plants make the body’s environment unsuitable for bacteria and viruses.
The folk way requires that we accept there is an invisible plane in the universe, that there is life present somewhere we can’t see it. Maybe it’s in a different realm or dimension, or maybe it’s right here with us. Accepting this notion I operate with the idea that my ancestors want to guide me from wherever they are in the invisible universe. To aid in this communication I find it crucial to work with the plants I know my ancestors lived with.
We communicate with plants through our senses, so when we are close to our ancestral plants we have the opportunity to taste, smell, touch, or to “see the light interact just so”, to stimulate a “knowing” or an understanding about a plant that we weren’t previously aware of. Suddenly we have a new understanding that we didn’t get from a book or a lecture, a knowledge gained from direct experience.
This is described by Robin Wall Kimmerer as the indigenous way of knowing (and something we all have access to when immersed deep in relationship to the land we inhabit), but I was not raised immersed in indigenous culture and practices. The ties to my indigenous ancestry were long-ago severed by colonization in Europe, and then South America.
Therefore, any folk-knowing I acquire springs from a calling, a pull, an urgency to build my own relationship with the land I inhabit, and through caring for my family with plant medicine. I use the Euro-folk and Latin American-folk information passed on from other folk herbalists* as a baseline and make connections from there. It helps to be a systems thinker who also sees the fine details. The more I work with plants, the more I make connections and see the nuances within our physical, emotional, and energetic ecosystems.
*Other folk herbalists who have come before me…and this line is long, ancient and we’re working with known ancient plants.
On this journey of learning from the land we discover there are unseen “places” we receive knowledge from (including our intuition) and this is a real and valid way of knowing and learning.
You may decide that you want to reserve special times, places, and spaces for “tuning in”. Some call these meditation rituals or spiritual practices…but it can be as simple as being still and listening. Some create alters or other intentional spaces to do this.
I prefer to “tune in” while working, sweeping, cleaning, gathering, or any kind of repetitive work that quiets the mind and helps me forget about time. I think this is because I tune in best while moving my body…it’s different for everyone.
Folkways include handfuls, pinches, and loose ratios. We rely on the body to understand temperature and moisture, to measure quantity and volume. The recipes are flexible, unique and alive. When I create an herbal tea blend it’s written down in terms of most and least plants used…this affords me the ability to flex depending on what plants are more or less abundant in any given year, and how the weather has shaped and changed the taste and/or the potency of the plant that year.
When I make a tincture, oxymel or herbal honey I fill a bottle with herbs in the amount suitable for that plant, and fill the jar the rest of the way with the chosen menstruum…it’s an eyeball situation, a feeling of how much honey/alcohol/water/vinegar is needed to give me the extraction I’m looking for. The medicine is made when the plants are available and with a large dose of intuition, following those strong pulls only to discover later the reason why. We are all connected and when we enter into relationship as a community, with the land for mutual care, then we are on an invisible web-of-knowing, communicating. The plants start to participate, and things fall into place to provide the medicine when it’s needed.
I wish you could have felt these Elecampane roots, they were buzzing! Everything has energy and I encourage everyone to take the time to feel it.
Folk medicine ways resist the commercialization of plants! Making plant medicine on a small scale, in a slow way, means I can only serve a community of a limited size. This mimics how the earth cares for the people it immediately interacts with, also called ‘bioregional herbalism’. This is not a money-making venture, this is a calling to service, called by the plants (and my heart).
The word folk may invoke stereotypes such as uneducated, or superstitious, but the process of gaining knowledge and understanding through folk-ways is the same process coined as the scientific method: observation, having theories, testing them through trial and error/experimentation, and using knowledge passed on from those who have used their own methods and processes to learn what a plant has to share.
I would consider this “folk information” the most accurate as it is living information, changing as plants change, and uniquely relevant to each constantly changing person and environment.
There are plants for each body system, and the knowledge of this was passed from person to person until eventually it was correlated to the common Western medical language we know and accept, to create Traditional Western Herbalism. TWH categorizes medicinal plants as diuretics, analgesics, lymphatics, lymphagogues, digestives, cholagogues, diaphoretics, emmenagogues, hemostatic, vulnerary, expectorant, carminative, alterative, inflammation-modulating…and on, in the language of the Western medical system.
Older systems, such as Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM), and Ayurveda (among others) have held onto their understanding of the unseen realms, and agree that healing is energetic and physical. I love to see the parallels between these systems.
With the industrialization of medicine in the West, allopathic medicine was born. I wouldn’t call it “healing”, because it sets out to treat symptoms, thereby causing an endless reliance on the state of “unwellness”.
Traditional Western Herbalism has combined folk knowledge with modern medical language and an allopathic approach: “This plant fixes that problem” which is completely reductive and not holistic. In modern medical practice, this allopathic way of thinking ignores the unseen realm and the wealth of information that flows from it. It ignores that we are energetic beings living in a soup of environmental energies and that healing is as much about rearranging matter, as it is about rearranging energies.
Because I live in a society heavily reliant on this allopathic model of treating symptoms (that causes more symptoms and on and on until the body breaks) I have learned the language of modern Western Herbalism (so-called Traditional Western Herbalism) so that I can make the idea of plant medicine makes sense to the person seeking help. This is necessary in a world where most no longer have enough contact with nature to trust plants. Most people want to hear how something will be fixed, even though energetic plant medicine doesn’t work this way. Folk medicine seeks to support both organ systems + energetic systems stimulating them to return to a state of optimal functioning, thereby allowing the body to heal itself
THIS is folk medicine! Conversations over time with plants and bodies to bring about well-being, repair, support, and in some cases transformation.
Hippeastrum reticulatum var. striatifolium is native to southern Brazil, specifically Espírito Santo the state I was born in.
how art practice fits into this “Folk Way”
I’m a folk painter…although not according to the institution or “academy” of art. They have their own definition of folk art/folk artist, and not surprisingly it defines a folk artist as being “uneducated” or more kindly put, “self taught”, and concerned with traditional common culture and daily life.
Even after having a rudimentary “art education” in college I’ve chosen to paint in this self-defined folk way: informed by my environment, feelings, images and understandings given to me in dreamtime. In this way my approach to art uses my own ordinary way of knowing, rather than studying artists within the institution and academia (past and present) for inspiration and content, or even studying or gathering symbology and mark making from other cultures. In the 21st century, Anthropocene, as a culturally mixed person who rejects most of the common culture, I’m digging into my own received visions and messages for content. My mark-making comes from subconscious memories of what I observe in my day-to-day and what is given to me possibly from my direct ancestral lineage, via the subconscious. It is an ordinary way of painting: fully expressive, reflective, and alive.
Getting a little woo-woo: It’s the way I celebrate being a unique expression of life on this planet, at this time. What a potent idea that is. That we’re all connected in our sameness, yet completely unique in some way that is a contribution to life on Earth. Experience is filtered through each one of us (*we are a unique filter*), and then that information is transmitted to the collective life-soup-juice that is the breathing, pulsing universe.
I admit it’s impossible to not be influenced by all the artists before me somehow embedded into my subconscious…as we are all connected in this collective soup. However, I often feel uninspired by, and tired of, the same outward expressions going around and around again, recycled like our socio-political histories on earth repeating over and over and over. Can’t we, as a species, dream up anything new??? Maybe it is impossible, but I will never know if I don’t try to dig into the unseen well through my creative practices.
We Will Keep Evolving ・ Part II, 2021, oil on canvas, 20”x24” $400 AVAILABLE IN THE SHOP!
In the dream I was standing on a balcony looking at the ocean at night, strangely the water started coming in fast…I felt worried that I needed to get off the balcony but I saw in the water something ancient, some kind of prehistoric ocean creature. I was with one of my kids (who is always in my ancient-ocean beach dreams), and I new I needed to retreat into the building for our safety. It was some kind of public hotel or restaurant. We went back inside and then down some back stairs toward a parking garage but we could see through a big glass wall of windows that the water had filled the parking garage the lights of the garage were lighting up the water with a greenish eerie glow and I could see many different prehistoric water beings there…had they come back? Was I time jumping? Were they there to tell me something…something about evolution. Something about how they are also my ancestors, about how their environment changed and over time their bodies evolved, as ours did, and ours will. They were telling me something about how what we have now will have to change, the waters will rise, we will need to move and communicate in new ways and our bodies will change, as they already are.
*** I don’t know if human evolution will speed up, as Earth degradation has at the hands of one species…but more technology that is out of synch with the Earth and all of its creatures, is not the kind of evolution I want. I’m referring to the billionaire transhumanists and their plans to reshape our species and drive evolution. That is not the kind of evolution I see in my dreams.
**** I want to take a moment to make clear that I am not against science, or western medicine. My life was saved (along with our firstborn’s life) in a hospital using a few Western medical practices, (alongside some folk practices) and for this I will always be grateful. Grateful for the advancements in medical science that continue to save lives and make people’s lives better.
It’s all the ways that the Western Medical system does NOT make people’s lives better, and in many cases decreases quality of life, that constantly reminds me of the urgent need for folk medicine ways, and plant medicine, to continue to be passed on and grow. We must always have the sovereignty to care for ourselves, our families, and our communities with the help of plants, and through our relationship to the land. We must be able to see our bodies as unique ecosystems, within the larger ecosystem, and to take care of ourselves in a holistic manner. 🤲