Elemental Seeds

On touch

‘Elemental Seeds’ by Me— Farnley Ochre, Red Chalk. Red Haemotite, Copper Ink, Oak Gall Ink, Acorn Ink.

I’m sitting here with a restlessness I have come to know as ‘things that need to be said’. The alchemical process of experience drip, drip, dripping into meaning. Into symbols. Into a living entity with needs of its own.

I’ve spent the morning teaching ‘Rooting into Place’: a community offering that combines Wild Pigments, Storytelling, Plant Medicine, Wild Food & Reciprocal Foraging. I share this work in marginalised lands, with marginalised people. Women escaping violence. Survivors of sexual assault. People recovering from mental illness, addiction, physical illness.

Most people think I am mad when I tell them what I do. When I breathe the words writer, storyteller, pigment tender, artist, community herbalist, forager, teacher. I tell them I am mad. To a civilised mind. Western mechanised thought does not have space to hold such complexity. I combine these disciplines for that reason. Challenge. Mind does not thrive in a monocrop. Nothing does. We all know that.

I wrote this curriculum in the first year of my recovery. A year when the husk of my life underwent a process of shedding. A dissolution. It isn’t a surprise to me that this course emerged as the old order was collapsing. Through the thin days, I would walk & I would sit. I would nurture & often act on the desire to rub humus over my skin. Soil kissed flesh marked with the pigment of place. I’d scream into the wind like the Tawny that sometimes came to watch me. Sing, until I felt relief. My hands would literally itch for the soil. My nose hungry for the perfume of actinobacteria & microbes within earth. At night, I would sit outside, barefoot, toes tingling & alive, head lost in the blue black sky. I would walk through storms & rain down to the woods. I would walk in snow & sleet.

As is the case with most experiences, it was only in hindsight that I became able to name the fervor which characterised my behaviour in those months. Decomposition. I’d like to say ‘I’ had a role in the decomposition of the identity ‘I’ had constructed for myself. The identity that had pulled me so far away from who I was, I had forgotten what it was I was supposed to be doing here, on this planet. Thankfully, I am part of a cosmos; ways of being that are far greater & far more significant than me. Like the stars, like all things, there comes a time for collapse, for reckoning. 

“In stars, lighter elements fuse with heavier ones, until they begin to fuse with the twenty-sixth element, iron. Once iron tries to fuse, it acts like the straw that breaks the camel's back.” (Heidi Gustafson ‘Book of Earth’)

It is a moment that explodes the stellar body: breaks it. Supernovae. Surrendering to addiction is by no means a supernovae. But, it certainly feets akin to one.

Ashes to ashes. Dust to dust. Iron to Iron.