Chive Blossoms and Elderflower in Acts of Defiance
I love coming to know and work with the food and medicines at my doorstep. This year, I’m so excited to cultivate and harvest as much as I can from the small piece of land I live on in British Columbia.
This is all rather new to me. I wasn’t raised learning how to do such things. I’ve taken a handful of herbal medicine and foraging workshops over the years. Scrounge the internet for tips. Canvas friends for insight.
So far this year I’ve made cottonwood oil (balm of Gilead), rose water, rose oil, chive blossom vinegar, lovage syrup, elderflower cordial and elderberry syrup. I’ve harvested dandelion, false solomon's seal, hawthorn, wild yarrow, rhubarb, lemon balm and oregano. Little herb and vegetable beings are growing steadily in pots and plots around the house. I run out to defend the chickens against skunks and racoons. The bees have been buzzing around the soon to be raspberries, huckleberries, and thimbleberries.
Being in a global pandemic and finishing up art therapy grad school slowed me down, kept me in place. In the spring, between endless zoom calls and giving umpteen presentations on environmental arts therapy, I pruned, raked, turned and prepared the land. I watched the snow melt, and tiny life emerge from the dark, colourless earth. I planted seeds, some of which grew, many of which didn’t. Now, midsummer, I bask in the flourishing about me.
Growing, tending and harvesting these plants feels like coming home somehow. Like coming back to myself. It feels like a tangible act of defiance in a world permeated with unsustainable consumerism. It feels like an act of defiance against how the earth wisdom was burned, beaten and drowned out of my female ancestors. It feels like an act of defiance to intimately come to know the land I live on when there’s so many other things demanding attention.
Our world is clearly hurting, ever shifting. We are surrounded by violence and oppression towards our fellow humans and the earth that is our home. Standing up to this is crucial, is of fundamental importance, now more than ever. And I want to honour everyone who does so, in their own unique ways. I want to honour how much resourcing, resilience and strength this takes. Thank you.
Always, there’s the rallies, donations, volunteering, and challenging conversations. Always, there’s the ongoing, feeling out of how to best give back, and having a truthful look at my privileges as a white, settler Canadian. There’s so much to do, and where to start, when it all seems so big?
Some days, I just start at my doorstep. As simple as it may be, learning how to make medicines from the land around me feels like a tangible act of defiance against a long-standing system of oppression. Somehow, squeezing the medicines from cheesecloth and sharing them with the people in my life feels like an act of reclamation and reconnection.
Bring on the chive blossoms and elderflower.
