Belonging with Yarrow
Belonging: A practice of Grief & Pleasure with Yarrow
I am so honored to share I was published in an Irish radical zine, Airmid’s Journal! Here’s the artcile.
I am one of millions of people on Turtle Island, North America, with Irish lineage whose knowledge of their ancestral practices are left untraceable by family folklore or practice. Although I have been practicing herbalism for nearly a decade now, my journey into learning my Irish roots is relatively new. I had been learning mostly from white North Americans about herbalism from distant lands- Ayruveda from India and Tradition Chinese Medicine. I was paying white bodied people, whose lineages were likely as broken as my own, to teach about cultures that were not theirs to teach. Furthermore, from cultures that had been colonized by the ancestors of the people who are now profiting off of sharing this knowledge with no consent or reciprocity for taking that knowledge. This is cultural appropriation, both by the teachers and myself, as a student. I shed tears of shame and grief that inevitably arise from the hungry ghost that is so thirsty for culture and a sense of belonging.
We turn to the plants because we all have ancestral knowledge of plants imbedded in us for medicine, for healing, and for learning right relationship. For some, the plant knowledge courses through them; kept alive through oral traditions and practices of their ancestors. While for any others, including myself, colonization has left us with only whispers and dreams. This is a story of how to hear those whispers and cultivate the love language of plant connection.
Yarrow is one of my oldest plant relationships. Nine years ago, in my first year as a land steward and herbal farmer in Central Vermont, they beckoned me to stoop down and taste them, sit with them, walk among them in the field and on the edge of the woods. Yarrow/Achillea millefolium/Athair thalún, is a perennial growing on every continent of the world, except Antarctica. There are myths spanning the world about them; playing the archetype of healer, protector and container of magical powers. Yarrow, aromatic and bitter, was my first taste of healing my relationship to my ancestors. I could feel in Yarrow’s presence; the thin thread that traveled through my blood from my father’s father’s father (and mother). I can feel a knowing, as if we know one another from another life...because we literally do! My ancestors were in relationship to Yarrow. I belong to Yarrow. I feel a sense of place and reverence in a time where belonging feels like a privilege lost by my people. Can you feel it when you sit with a plant whose cousins grow where you are from? Can that belonging be remembered? Are we allowed to feel a kinship to plants that were not shown to us by our living grandparents? So many questions left unanswered.
Yarrow is cool and slightly dry, offering the power to stop bleeding through coagulation (styptic), to balance hormones in relationship to menstruation (emmenagogue) and to reduce inflammation, just to name a few of their actions on the body. Yarrow has an affinity for the pelvic region, reducing postpartum bleeding and excess bleeding during menses, as well as aiding abortion in the earliest weeks of pregnancy. Yarrow’s lacy, deeply divided leaves resemble the vascular system, sharing their connection to circulation, as well as knitting of the skin. Yarrow, found often on battlefields with the ability to stop bleeding, expresses a protective and even trauma-healing power.
In my herbal practice, I utilize the essence of the Yarrow flower for healing trauma- personal, collective, and generational. Trauma care starts at the inner most place of our being. Yarrow’s energy penetrates deep, healing from the inside out. Yarrow gives us permission to grieve and heal those deep wounds, so the next generation no longer needs to bleed from ancestral burdens as if they were our own. Yarrow reminds me to remember and forgive, instead of forget. Generational trauma needs love and labor to be reborn and healed. Have you ever sat with Yarrow? Have you ever asked Yarrow if they knew your great grandmother? Have you asked for permission to taste their delicate flowers and touch their exquisite leaflets?
To be completely honest, I have been resistant to learning herbal magic and medicine within the framework of my Irish lineage. First of all, how do I even get permission to learn of a culture I now have little embodied relationship to? Am I appropriating culture from Ireland, just as I was appropriating culture from other communities? That resistance is steeped in feeling both the victim and the perpetrator of violence in my body, as the blood of the colonizer still lives in me. That resistance, that stone wall boundary in me, is a cancel culture safety mechanism of fear, perpetuating the violence upon myself of separation.
But my queer, boundary bending body speaks in dreams, in pleasure, and in spells. With Mugwort I dream of swimming in the Irish sea; with wild Yarrow I give my tears and my prayers to the lands of the Abenaki, crossing those colonial boundaries to make space for faith. For love. For relationship. The sensation of yarrow petals on my fingertips and on my tongue quench that thirst for connection. As an offering, I give my moon blood every cycle to the plants with a prayer and a spell. “I belong to you,” I whisper. On the full moon, I howl and scream for belonging.
As a move towards right relationship with my ancestors and my Irish lineage, my sibling Mica McDonald, Rue McDonald (only related as chosen family), and I started a podcast, Airmid’s Almanac, as white settlers with Irish lineage sharing decolonial practices of herbal medicine and myth, queerness and magic, and astrology and ancestral healing. Creating this queer space to process this grief through laughter, joy and herbal magic, I slowly dissolve that protective resistance to my ancestors to make room for connection, right relationship and spirit. Forgiveness, I have been told, is not about letting someone off the hook, but instead unhooking one’s own heart from the harm. For me, forgiveness has taken a lot of courage, as well as healing around my fear of historical cycles of violence. I pour my mason jar filled with menstrual blood into the bare earth and ask for forgiveness. Forgiveness, for me, makes space in my heart for the ancestral prayers to be heard in the form of whispers on the wind.
We are all implicated in this world. With the aid of Yarrow and other plant friends, we can melt away our separations and realize we need each other, including the ancestors and future generations. Choice is power. I choose connection, curiosity and pleasure. I choose to face the harm I cause to be the agent of change that my queer witch ancestors called for. I choose to give from a place of abundance so that we all can have access to what is for everyone. I close my eyes, give gratitude, and make space to listen. Are you willing to hear the whispers of your plantcestors?
Thank you to my teachers, including adrienne maree brown of Pleasure Activism, Sabia Wade of Birthing Advocacy Doula Training and king yaa of Birthing Beyond the Binary.
Dec 22, 2021