Notebook Witch

🕯Blessèd Imbolc🕯

Develop the muscle of generosity like you are training for a giving ultra-marathon. Share everything you can with anyone who asks, and ask for what you need.

Get in touch with your body. You will need it, and it knows things. Pay attention to what is happening below your neck.

Tell the truth. Tell it to yourself first.

Sit at the feet of your most vulnerable neighbors and your own most vulnerable places. They have the most to teach you about survival.

Listen. Remember your ancestors, and the things they survived. Find the resilience that is your birthright and the courage that made way for your life.

Practice taking risks. Show up in every struggle where someone is fighting for their dignity, because that is how we will all survive.

Learn about reparations, and native sovereignty. Double down on exorcising supremacy systems from your soul.

Learn to be tender. Refuse to be hardened. Let your heart be moved. Every damn time.

Root in the place you are. Learn its history. Learn its geography. Learn its seasons.

Sing. A lot. And dance. Make art. Make love. Rest luxuriously. Eat pie. …

The world is ending and beginning now. We are surviving now.

Let us love, let us connect, let us fight like hell for the dignity of each and all

——-

From the Rev. Molly Housh Gordon,

I’m not alone in this love that saturates more than for any other poet. I think because you give so much of yourself, we are devoted due to your generous vulnerability.

There is something else too, though, for me. Neponset, Nantasket, Hanover, World’s End—to drop them into your poems is like a code for future poets from the South Shore. A message, “yes, I’ve felt the lonely isolation of being a weird arty type where banality thrives.” I think only we catch the depths of those word drops, which is why we get a little giddy when we find them in your work, and discover amongst ourselves who else has had that rush of recognition, that release of relief when we receive the encoded message, and we realize we’re not alone in that loneliness we once knew before we made it out.

Eat the Weeds: The Magnificent Dandelion

(Taraxacum spp.)

I am loathe to call these incredible plants “weeds,” but weeds they are in the eyes of most. I use them as salad greens, but the flowers can be made into wine and soft drinks, and the roasted roots make a caramel-like a coffee substitute. Parts of the plant can also be used for natural yellow and green dyes.

The plant itself is a dynamic accumulator and producer or an array of essential vitamins, minerals, and nutrients (vitamins A, C and K, and calcium, potassium, iron and manganese).

This sunshine-yellow flower attracts pollinators to the garden, grows in a wide variety of circumstances, and with a long taproot cycles deeply-buried soil nutrients to the surface (a so-called “fountain plant”). Numerous species of butterfly rely on it for sustenance during various stages of their life cycles.

Various dandelion extracts are being researched as cancer medicines, as all parts of the plant contain a number of pharmacologically-active compounds. Long used in folk medicine as a tonic for the blood, liver, and gall bladder, dandelions have a mild diuretic and laxative effect on the system: it is a registered drug in Canada for this reason. 

Dandelions are among my favourite plants, and if they weren’t already so abundant, I would plant them! If you can find them in a place that is not plagued by runoff or sprayed with pesticides, I’d highly recommend you explore their culinary and medicinal potential.

More: “A weed is a plant that has mastered every survival skill except for learning how to grow in rows.”

http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/wieners/

Google Books offers a limited view of Cultural Affairs in Boston: Poetry & Prose 1956-1985