{ part 2.}
“The earth herself becomes my master story teller” Thus Spoke The Plant - Monica Gagliano This too is my truth. When I listen to her stories, I’m not listening from my mind or even my emotions but my heart, and when I listen from that very infinite void space, the plants will show me, I’m relinquishing my innate human desire to control the outcome even unconsciously and dropping into the space between were time folds back on itself, and opens up an otherwise closed circuit of possibly, and by doing this they become my greatest teachers, & with this I am able to hear what wisdoms other medicine people & earth midwifes have placed into the earth herself through ceremony, ritual & reverence before me & also after me, those that reside in spaces between, having now departed or not yet arrived. For the last month I’ve been working with the plant Verbascum or Mullein. Each day she blooms a small handful of flowers & each day I harvest them, singing icaro. I take the blooms and place them in my drying room to release some of the moisture, the following day I place them in a jar of olive oil creating slow direct medicine. I do this each & everyday in her season, with the over seeing mother plant and all the other plants on our property, ritually & in deita. I wasn’t yet aware how the mullein was working through me so that way (from a plant initiate perspective) I couldn’t attach any for-drawn ideas out of ego, I knew from what Maia Toll calls the “first song” the song of chemicals, constitutes of the plant healing, this plant ally is excellent for respiratory health, sore throats & coughs, she’s also a good earache healer (hence I had been making an offering of mulllein earache oil) But this story is more about the second song walking viscerally through my blood & bones at a quite almost undetectable level. During this time mullein spirit was weaving her medicine through my emotional body unhinging an outdated personal program that echoed suspicious stories into an anxious mind, throwing up parts of me that just weren’t communicating, archetypes needing deep integration which was creating resistance in the way I was viewing myself in relationship to my reality - shadow work, that I had visited many times before. The moment of realization mullein plant spirit had been weaving in my field I had opened Maia Tolls Herbiary on the day I received her book right on the page on Mullein. Mullein Medicine “brings multifaceted understandings into alignment with one another, building intellectual bridges between seemingly disparate or disjointed things - because her gift is seeing the structure of the whole, she’ll sing the relationship of bone to water, or air to skin in a way that makes you wonder how you never saw those pattens yourself” She had been showing me the entire time about integrating these parts of myself, connecting the disparate, showing me a deeper level of my desire for understanding totality in all things; which is why I need to also start to write, write in a way that I can help others feel into the spaces that link the in between & the second song themselves, their own medicines, their own alchemy, but also to understand earth wisdom, shamanic & plant medicine work as multi dimensional, both shadow & light, carrying great responsibility, reverence & the need for spiritual hygiene. The plants walk the lower world, the collective unconscious, the path of our soul & our ancestors and we must be willing to feel into them in their absolute authenticity & totality for them to honor us with their gifts & insights. I will go further into this via a plant spirit who’s song i feel is being misappropriated having hit popular culture, xocolatl, theobroma cacao, sacred ixcacao. ( to be cont’d part: 3) *{Artist - unknown}