the harvest is the medicine
Abalone Field Notes 03 | 05.13.24
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Medicinal Sirens.
I’ve had my eye on the milky oats. Last year I missed the harvest, and there has been a lonesome un-fillable hole in my apothecary ever since. I’ve checked my spot every few days since the rains stopped. I have yet to find oat medicine that compares to the brew I make from our local wild fatua. It is strong, and gentle, and delicious; I add just one fresh vanilla bean to my stock bottles after I press.
Some medicines are on pure solar cycles, like pedicularis. It can be an endless winter (like last year) or a warm summery March (like the one before)- doesn’t matter. Those electric-pink muppets of analgesic delight always show up around the same time. Milky oats are different. They get tall when the sun comes out for good, and ripen to their milk stage after a few weeks of solid sunbathing. This year they’re taking their time - it has been a cold wet spring.
Last week, after those few days of intense sunshine, I was optimistic, but they were still not ready - the seed pods were deflated and soft, not yet filled with milk. Instead, I found a small sea of rose clover. They call rose clover “invasive” but I don’t pretend to know the infinite wisdom of nature. Milky oats are “invasive” too, and contain nerve-soothing medicine that modern anxious humans ubiquitously need - have they come to help? I believe our medicine seeks us out in a way that escapes modern domesticated understanding. Anyway - the rose clover is non-toxic and tastes similar to the medicinally-famous red variety (lymph, skin, blood) so I’m going to experiment.
I have to be real with you. I get real overwhelmed with the pace of this modern hustle. On that day I went up for oats, I was spun out, I’d been tending too many things at once for weeks on end with no real pause. I intended to take a hike if the oats weren’t ready because how could I not need a good long roam across the land? When I started to gather that perfect fresh clover, making my offerings of tobacco and songs, the sun was warm. The wind was rippling the barbata in watery green-gold waves across the hills, a la Miyazake. Sublime. I stopped, and watched. and remembered how absurd it is to try to rush a harvest.
With medicine, rushing just does not abide.
The clover drew me down into meadow land outside of time. I didn’t need to hike. I needed to lay down under the open sky. I peeled off a few layers so my feet were bare and my skin was in sun. I nestled myself down on my hoody in a bed of green oatgrass between swaths of pink Trifolium. I went into a daydream trance pulling the flower tops - only the most perfect ones - from their stems, into my baskets, stopping often to watch the bees, their legs heavy with beads of brilliant orange pollen. The bees gathered from each little petal-tube individually - a clover blossom is a bouquet of nectar and pollen - and medicine. I watched the way the inflorescence rippled from bottom to top - I was merely catching a snapshot of the spiral wave each blossom was riding. They would keep blooming after I left; I was just a splash in time. I tried to notice which cups the bees drank from to inform my choice of who to take. Pale or dark petalled, early or late in bloom - they didn’t seem to discriminate as much as I did.
I moved to a few different spots to sprawl and harvest and watch the bees and the wind on the hill… and the white little butterflies… and the raptors gliding below my hilltop, and above… an hour passed, then more… as I got swallowed into the detail of petals, my scattered mental & energetic chaos slowed and finally my mind was restored to a calm, clear deep well of perception and stillness. My body totally relaxed. The natural state of a healthy Shen, or spirit, connected to the elements and natural environment at rest.
The medicine is the act of the harvest.
When I was little, so many days were filled with meadowlike trances, lost in the micro-fauna of decomposing logs, crawling through the ferns under the pines, swimming eyes open in lakes, lying on the dock with sisters late at night, far from city lights, swallowed completely by a star-smeared cosmos. And on, and on
In our natural connected state, human animals spend our waking hours in meadows, forests, rivers, mesas… tending, gathering, pounding, garbling, grinding… touching each seed, flower, and tuber that will become the medicine and food for the people we know. Like those precious moments conjured at the Oak Granary with my witchy sister Lindsay. By our wild design, we are outdoors almost all the time, bathing in wild water, drawn into the unfolding seasons through our necessary and detailed harvest of the rich and subtle messaging of all the non-human life. Gathering as a path, allowing ourselves to be magnetized by the harvest. Like our indigenous ancestors. If we are lucky, we have body memories of this, a true north and a bone-knowing of what it is to be well. To show us how to fly straight with this anthro-electro-magnetic shit-storm endlessly barraging and dulling our senses.
Lets not underestimate the power of this form of our medicine - the accidental pilgrimage, the surrender to the siren call of the plants. The act of the harvest is not a tangent to the final brew, nor is it the weaker version. It is the gold-standard, the very heart of a remedy. The most potent dosing of herbs comes when they compel us to be with them in their element, and to stay a while.
A good, slow harvest is not a taking - it is a drawing-in.
On a good day, we spend time in nature-as-backdrop… earbuds in, on a call or listening to an audiobook… having beers at the beach around a fire, telling stories… walking on a trail with a friend or alone, talking or thinking all the while about the theater of our lives… these are all beautiful things that I love to do, but all the while a wild infinity of medicinal truth is unfolding at the veld of our senses, crowded just out of reach. If I had taken that hike I would have been walking with an internal racket. I might have gone quieter by the end, but I never would have met all those lovely bees. Instead, the clover drew me in.
A week after my recalibration in the clover I went up to harvest oat tops with another witchy kindred of mine, Caroline - she may have helped you behind the counter at the apothecary. This time, they were ready. We chewed oat tops between our teeth to squeeze out the milk and test each stalk for ripeness, dosed and dosed with that calming blissful nerve-food medicine. A sense that everything is okay. A sweetness. A slowing of time. Incredible for the fight-or-flight hypervigilant amp that some bodies get into. Supreme medicine for acute grief. A balm for the intensity of quitting an addiction. Invasive? I think not.
In the liminal space between meadow and the digito-industrial world where I write to you, is the tincture on the shelf. The bridge. Born of bewitchery - of me, by the oats. My senses drawn to the fattest juiciest oats, while a little drunk on that mother’s milk. It is all in the dark little bottle glowing from within, a quiet beacon in a building in a town, ready to slip alimentarily in, transmitting deep and subtle peace, all it knows about the sunshine and the butterflies and the mycelia and the wind and the sky and the memory of the land.
People often come into Abalone saying something just drew them in.
If its not magic, its not medicine.
beautiful Alison