My piece in Auntie Bellum

As I continue to reflect on 2015, a highlight that persists is having my piece, Lessons From a Seven-Year-Old published in Auntie Bellum, a southern feminist online magazine.

I absolutely love this illustration for the piece done by Jaime Chason. It was an honor to have my writing put up in such a sweet publication. Auntie Bellum is "an honest, unapologetic voice for southern women." Their content interweaves personal stories, intersectionality, and current events. They are based in South Carolina (a place so dear to my heart) and I really enjoy reading their offerings and encourage folks to check them out.

As 2016 continues to take shape, and I examine my direction and make decisions about the focus of my creative energy, I hope to continue to participate in this honest, unapologetic conversation.

Note, this was written in October. It relates my work as a student with the Living Earth School.

A couple weekends ago, I woke outside to a brisk green morning. Peeking out from the depths of my sleeping bag, my face was greeted by cold air and my vision with the white ashes covering the coals of our overnight fire. Beyond that, a few other friends nestled in sleeping bags around the fire. It was the beginning of the second day of the first weekend of the Living Earth Adult Foundations or LEAF program. Later as we all moved around making our preparations for the day, our instructor Hub appeared with a big branch still covered in leaves. Its reddish brown bark was smattered with small horizontal lines, and the leaves were finely, doubly saw-toothed. He snapped a twig and had us all take a sniff—the refreshing wintergreen smell hit me right in the gut. It’s a smell that warms you in the belly. Hub invited us to come and snap twigs and place them in the kettle, placed on the fire for about 15 minutes, to brew up some Sweet Birch tea.
This plant was Sweet Birch, betula lenta, also commonly called black birch, cherry birch, and mahogany birch. There is one other birch in our area, bonus points if you can name it in the comments below (a hint: it’s more in the high mountains.) Birch is a profoundly useful tree: the bark was traditionally used in the making of canoes, baskets, and cups. The tar is called the first superglue as well as an early form of chewing gum. The Creek people used birch to treat tuberculosis; the Catawba boiled the buds with sulfur and made a salve to treat ringworm and sores. The Cherokee treated colds, dysentery, and urinary problems with birch tea and by chewing the young leaves. Today, folks laud the teas diuretic and sedative effects in addition to the soothing quality in topical uses—say, for example, that wily case of poison ivy that won’t respond to usual treatments like calamine, jewelweed, and even tannic acid made from boiling acorns (an anecdote from Tom Brown’s Guide to Wild Edible and Medicinal Plants).

In addition to all this, incredibly enough, the inner bark can be boiled like noodles or dried and ground to make a flour. The wood burns reliably, even when wet, and can be used as dye for a fawnlike color. A birch feeds birds with a million seeds per year, and is the exclusive host to birch polypore mushroom, which I’ve read is used in finishing the finest edge in sharpening a knife.

While our tea brewed, Hub told us of an elder of his who said that sweet birch just lends a feeling of happiness and well-being. On that cool morning, with that sweet taste, we couldn’t argue with that.

I’ll leave you with this recipe for birch beer from Edible Wild Plants: A North American Field Guide to Over 200 Natural Foods by Thomas Elias and Peter Dykeman:

4 gallons birch sap (tapped in spring, 3-4 after the sugar maples)
1 gallon honey
4 quarts fine twigs
1 yeast cake

Boil honey and sap ten minutes and pour over twigs. When cool, strain and add yeast. Cover and ferment one week or until cloudiness begins to settle. Bottle and cap tightly.

lessons from a seven year old

A few weeks ago I had the joy of leading a group of 7-10 year olds on a creek wander in Sugar Hollow. One girl was smaller than the rest of the group and needed to return to camp to swap for better shoes and use the bathroom soon after we descended the short trail down to the creek access under our rickety bridge. Because of this, we walked that short path three times, each time noticing a small grasshopper, motionless atop of a leaf. "Maybe it's dead," we wondered. "These things do happen." When we finally finished our wander, having veered west up a small, colder tributary- rich with worlds of exposed, gnarled sycamore root embedded with rocks and an uphill scramble emerging from the creek bed- we again walked down that short path to retrieve the cache of water bottles we'd stashed for hands-free ease of exploration. Still, the grasshopper was motionless. Now we knew it was dead, hours had passed. The smallest girl, who had been by my side often throughout the wander, requiring an extra hand of support where her small feet had less stability, was moved, wanted to honor the grasshopper's life and place in the world, and knew what to do. She plucked a sycamore leaf, soft and broad, and a yarrow flower, fragrant and delicate. Tenderly she laid the leaf back a few feet from the path, placed the flower atop it, and laid the grasshopper in the center, his resting place. She took my hand and we crossed the country road to head back to camp.

I was so taken with her simple wisdom. These two plants, and how well they were fitted to the task.

Sycamore, who likes to have wet feet, leading us to water to wash away our grief, usher souls from this world to the other invisible side. Sycamore whose bark, close to the earth, is brown, rooted, and barky, but as the eyes moves up the trunk it begins to flake away, peeling back in layers, before emerging, white and smooth, branched arms thrusting towards the sky like wings. An image of transcendance, transition, passing.

And yarrow, who treats deep cuts, lessening pain, stopping the bleeding, is a fitting medicine for grief. Yarrow's recorded history of human use is interlaced with the advancement of metalwork technology, especially in warfare. With new blades came deep-life threatening wounds, creating the urgent need for analgesic, antiseptic yarrow to stop the bleeding, reduce the pain, prevent infection. The trauma of grief cuts deeper than the blunt force wounds of the everyday, and calls for the medicine of yarrow. The oldest known use of yarrow was in a Neanderthal funeral setting, found laid beside a human skeleton dated to 100,000 BCE in a cave in Iraq. (for more info, and my source, check out Ryan Drum's amazing page on yarrow) The leaves are dazzling complex, tiny and pointing in many directions, giving yarrow its specific name, millefolium- a thousand leaves. This image, combined with the exploding umbel flower structure, give me a feeling of dispersal, that seems to frame a healthy view of passing.

The next day my partner arrived at camp with bad news: that a white man in Charleston had killed nine people in a black church. A Charleston native, my partner was angry and heartbroken. In country life, there's often not a way to join in on a group vigil or demonstration or action. We read the news but we live further from places where people gather and it feels hard for us to give support. There is this awful feeling of helplessness that comes with human atrocity, with injustice. We walk and work with grief and anger and it has no where to go. I took him to our swim hole to cool down, relief from the summer sun, and then upstream to the place near the bridge where I'd learned about grief from a seven-year-old. Together we set nine little yarrow leaves downstream on nine little sycamore-leaf boats, along with a wish to honor those souls robbed of their lives, and a wish for the watching world- for clear eyes, willingness to understand the still-relevant legacy of racism and white supremacy in our world, and for the inner fires leading the work towards a more-okay world. We hugged and walked back up that trail. We got what we needed then from that small act. Now, later on, the watching world is seeing the confederate flag come down from the State House in Columbia, SC. My hope is for the new children, southern babies, black and white babies, who are being born into a world where that flag isn't flown by the state, we welcome them into a world that is a step closer to the world they need, and deserve.