Hi friends! Happy lunar new year! 

 

I’m writing you from a slight moment of pause between classes - my 2024 Flowering Round and Herbal Mystery School classes wrapped up earlier this month and I am preparing for the 2025 cohorts to begin in March. Turning Toward The Flower also starts in March, leading up to the arrival of Spring. Becoming Kin is still in session, and we gather every two weeks throughout the winter and into April. Right now we are conjuring the community of Saints, our communal dead & cultivating practice through praying Novenas, a technology that has roots in ancient Greek mourning practices. I'm really enjoying this work and it feels very nourishing at this moment in time. 

 

In February, a new offering called The Flower Guild will be kicking off. This is an essence practitioner circle that is only open to graduates of Flowering Round. We have 22 guild members (myself included) and we will be gathering twice a month to deepen our craft. I also made us Official Guild Pencils, see below. ;)

So while I am not teaching as much as I normally do, there is a lot to tend to in the apothecary. The preparations for these classes involve long hours of bottling medicine and essences to send to students for the year ahead. The apothecary has been a cozy cave as we were truly in deep winter this last month with temps below zero. Candles are lit, the little space heater is going and I’m making lots of tea throughout the day to carry me through my bottling marathon. I counted the other day — 694 bottles of medicine total so far for all of the classes starting this Spring; each bottle receives a handwritten label, wrapped in lavender tissue paper. I have about another 400 to go. There are spreadsheets, address labels to print, stacks of padded mailers all sorted by size. Herbal Mystery School requires a few more steps; as I have (yet) to sort through dried herbs from the apothecary and make up 109 bags of herbs so each student has physical plant material to work with, as well as the tincture and essence of our nine initiatory plants. Our front porch has become an additional storage space for the stacks of empty 1 oz tincture bottles, which is fine because the only other thing we use it for during this season is to store firewood (which we have been burning through so quickly in this cold!).

 

Weekly client work also keeps me close to the apothecary; as does sending tinctures and tea blends to a few different mutual aid projects in LA for support from the fires as well as continued herbal support for a few Palestinian families here in NY. I am noticing that my supplies of Blue Vervain, Milky Oat and Motherwort tinctures that I made just this past summer (I strained them in September!) are already dwindling. It’s clear I need to double, perhaps triple, the amount of nervine tinctures I usually stock in the apothecary for the year ahead. Just yesterday, I learned that ICE was spotted in a nearby town of Amenia, NY this week, looking for people at a local food pantry. There have been raids in the area this past week. Fucking hell. Shit continues to get worse and I feel committed as ever to have the apothecary well stocked to support our bodies, spirits and communities in the months and seasons to come.

 

Tomorrow we are pruning the orchard before our Wassail celebration in the orchard next weekend. We will use the pruned branches to light our orchard fires next weekend. They will keep us warm. I am excited to gather with fellow apple devotees in the orchard. There is something very sweet about coming together to celebrate the plants, even in their dormant period, to cheer and sing and pray for their return and well-being in the approaching growing season. 

 

Announcements and links are below. 

 

Sending warmth from bottle-land,

x Liz 

 

~ Since I am not on IG anymore (Feb 7 will be seven months without! so! much! happier!) and hardly share pictures here, above are some photos of dipping candles with some dear friends for the solstice. We drank champagne and dipped candles and froze our butts off but it was so fun and our witch-finger candles are keeping the apothecary well-lit this season. I recommend a candle dipping gathering for keeping warm and in good spirits in the dead of winter. 

 

~ I still have one spot open in Flowering Round - my year round flower essence practitioner training. We begin in March! You can take TTTF this year (the pre-req course) and Flowering Round in the same year! Learn more about Flowering Round here.  

 

~ Listening to this and this often.

 

~ Just signed up for Native American Studies For Everyone, which I learned about from Chris La Tray's newsletter. It begins February 10th and is pay what you can. “Native American Studies for Everyone: This 10-week course will help participants develop their understanding of American Indian history, culture, policy, and contemporary issues in Indian Country.” 

 

~ Last night I finally got to watch La Chimera and it was as wonderful and magical as everyone says it is. A treasure of a film. See it! It's incredible. And it's on Kanopy - so you can watch it with a library card.

 

~ If you are in the Hudson Valley, I want to plug The Local in Saugerties. The shows that they have scheduled for the Spring are so amazing. We are very lucky to have such great programming here! 

 

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