heartwood
Just returned from an amazing weekend in Ithaca studying botany and plant medicine with Sevensong - it’s been 20 years since I’ve studied this work in a formal setting.
In college I was crazy (and indecisive?) enough to double major in dance… and plant biology.
Trying to juggle both for years was nearly impossible between labs, rehearsals, and ridiculous amounts of credit hours per quarter… and at some point I knew I was doing a disservice to both fields of study and it was time to make a choice to let something go.
It was a deeply difficult decision, because of the way I had fallen in love with plants, particularly plant medicine, ethnobotany, and the adventure of identifying them in wild habitats. That love had taken me to Belize, Guatemala, Bolivia and Peru, studying tropical medicinal plants and Andean violets, falling in glacial streams collecting algae (Brrrr!!), and finding tiny orchids along the way on the several day hike to Macchu Picchu.
In the end, my logic was that dancing was a shorter career path (I remember thinking I’m SO OLD at 23 to pursue this after college HA!). For this reason and others, I eventually chose to shift my entire focus to dance, which became a long journey through yoga, therapeutic and rehabilitative movement, and ultimately to where I am today…
But always in a back corner of my mind and heart sat my love of and friendship with the plant world.
As we walked through the woods on Saturday in Ithaca, I was reminded of these friendships that were still lingering quietly after all this time. A smile danced around my lips at recognizing plants like Bloodroot (Sanguinaria canadensis), Blue Cohosh (Caullophyllym thalictoides), and Witch Hazel (Hamamelis virginiana). I had a sense of coming home to an old love, familiar and steady.
When we learned to strip White Willow (Salix alba) of its outer bark and peel away the inner to reveal the heartwood, I joined all the other students in a sense of awe and pure enjoyment to work with the plant in this way. Like others, at times I lingered in conversation, but there were also many moments of pure absorption in the beauty and mystery of drawing medicine from the just cut limbs of a tree. In a sense, as the layers revealed themselves and the whole turned slowly to smaller and smaller pieces (and ultimately to the constituents being extracted in alcohol for tincture), it was like revealing our own nature: fully whole and also only ever the sum of all the parts that come together to make us moment by moment. An ever changing cacophony of causes and conditions, arising anew to become what we always are.
Like the Salix, I sense my layers revealing themselves, the inner medicine slowly coming to surface as the draw knife of rediscovery sheds my outer bark. My heartwood is much thicker than the last time I dug in.
20 years of rings to be exact.
