Home again, after travels (to Utah and Colorado in July, and, most recently, to Tennessee and Kentucky), and I find myself in the sweep of time and heart that signals the end of summer.

This past week we attended Divine Liturgy at our Island’s Russian Orthodox Monastery to celebrate The Transfiguration of our Lord, one of my favorite major feast days. I believe Luke 9:28-36 was read, but I’m particularly fond of Matthew’s version, so mostly quote that here.

During this event, Jesus takes three of his apostles – Peter, James, and John – up a high mountain, Mount Tabor. There, he transfigures before them, appearing in divine glory:

The prophets Moses and Elijah appear then, and converse with Christ about “His decease which He was about to accomplish at Jerusalem” (Luke 9:31). Peter is beside himself at the sight, and suggests that they make three tabernacles, one each for Jesus, Moses, and Elijah, but:

In the church, white morning light poured in through the tower windows above the altar, a bit of that glory before me. And I wonder: Do I? In what and how many ways am I not hearing him?

Back home, I settle into my prayer outside. A poem emerges.

Transfigured

Bittersweet we near summer’s end
and the light slants
to console with a burnished hand
the weary summer grasses

Blackberries tumble
in weighty burden, and,
on wizened trees,
Italian plums tighten
in purple regard.

There! Queen Anne’s Lace,
who fanned forth dozens of
delicate parasols,
now coils a few
into tiny cupped nests,
cradling her ripening treasure.
The meadow birds are mostly silent now,
but – perhaps -
our lady’s hushed seeds
incubate their song.

Nearby is our sentinel,
Evening Primrose,
who had illumined
lemon yellow lanterns
in yesterday’s dusk.
He now closes petal fingers
in sign to the
climbing sun.

Under the witness of time,
all my bold
intentions for summer
have scattered, and
I have given way to what
each day brings.
Perhaps I am now humbled like
Martha
to take Mary’s better part
and sit at His feet.

Thin clouds stretch
across a glorified sky,
and the sun hymns heat
and last hurrahs,
Mama Doe and her triplet fawns,
who are larger now and nearly
spotless,
smooth into
the gold-brown of the land.
Despite odds they
have survived twin threats:
coyotes and cars,
nature and man

Echoes of Fall
stir in all hearts
underground
and overhead,
and in some hidden place
one tendril stirs, and then another,
toward last ditch activity
as we turn toward final harvest.
No matter our calendar,
the year progresses
toward death

Today I will tend
to the last days of summer
as if washing linens and
laying them out, doing that last
little bit
to taste and see
hear and know.

The berries are so sweet
and the clouds confess.
They are eager and dappled now
tiny lambs in a long wide flock
in full movement across the sky

Hear him!

Before it all falls away.

Here is one of the new illustrations:

Paloma and Wings in Grandmother Bay Tree - Illustration by Jane Valencia

It’s tempting to dive into updating my book, and - as I did three years ago - self-publish it.

But the holiday season approaches, and for many reasons, it may be better to wait and take some time to reflect, and to pray: “Holy Spirit, guide me.”

We’ll see what the new year brings regarding this duo and their project!

In the meantime, I can’t help but muse on herbs, and the part they play in God’s mercy and design.

God’s story with the human family is a love story. Herbs are an expression in the Book of Creation of that encompassing and deeply personal love. Plants give: Air to breathe, nutrients to build the soil, food and habitat for many creatures, fiber for our clothing, materials, medicine, beauty and inspiration, opportunities for play (follow a child into a garden or down a forest path!) and even reverence. And we enjoy and love them in turn. Adam and Eve were the first gardeners, and tending to people with plant medicine has been and can be an extension of this original devotion.

I am sure that after the Fall, in addition to teaching Adam and Eve to hunt (as indicated by the animal skin clothes he gave them), that God opened their minds and hearts to working with the herbs for medicine!

Here is a poem I wrote awhile back, inspired as I continually am by St. Hildegard of Bingen, who worked with and wrote about herbs. St. Hildegard would never have considered separating her practice as an herbalist physician from her understanding of creation, life, and wellbeing as being treasures from God.

Sun That Warms Me

Sun that warms me
above around within
heart fire in every cell

Garden that is the earth of me
organs, sinew, bone
limbs, brain, blood and lymph
heart and many elements

Hildegard knew your language
I strive to learn it too:

Your wisdom expressed in the virtues
plants and their song
the seasonal orchestra of weather and soil
the anima that is
your breath in each one of us
the movement of stars and the balance of waters

How far we have come from even a recent time when
attentive folk and physicians understood
that we are gardens
and that to heal is to be a gardener in devotion
coaxing an attentive ear to the heart
the activity of rivers discerned in a pulse
the wellness of spirit expressed
in the light of one's eye

Blessed are you, I AM,
who shaped us in your image
inquisitive, intelligent, creative
and formed us to serve in
love and discipline,
compassionate skill and
listening art

May we be faithful stewards
of your healing ways

Amen.

Until next time!

Yours in Christ,
Jane

10/30/24 Newly added: an audio of the tune played by me on my harp! See end of post.

Michaelmas – the Christian Feast Day of St. Michael the Archangel – is celebrated on September 29^th. But I recently learned that this feast day was once celebrated on October 10^th or 11^th, and that “Old Michaelmas,” at least in Britain, also commemorated the day that Satan was cast out of heaven.

To fill you in, St. Michael the Archangel fought against Lucifer and the other fallen angels. He is considered to be the leader of the heavenly hosts. He is our protector in spiritual warfare, and, as the Prayer to St. Michael goes, our defender “against the wickedness and snares of the Devil.” In reading about Old Michaelmas, I discovered that when Lucifer hurtled to earth, he fell into a blackberry bush. The ensnarer became the ensnared!

I’m sure most of us agree that falling into blackberry would cause anyone grief. And, indeed, tradition has it that the Devil, caught in this particular earthly torment, became enraged. He cursed blackberry, spat upon it, scorched it with his fiery breath, and, according to Cornish legend, even urinated upon this vigorous and jabby plant.

As a result, blackberries are not to be harvested after October 10^th. You may think to yourself, why would I want to harvest blackberries anyway, their delicious summer goodness being long past? Let this little legend help you set aside any lingering temptation to pick one last berry, and leave blackberries well enough alone until next year.

An Irish proverb, says: “On Michaelmas Day, the devil puts his foot on blackberries.”

Life is surprising. After reading about the Devil and blackberries, I recalled a Celtic-inspired illustration I’d painted several years ago of a man with a thorny harp entangled in a blackberry bush. I had even composed a rambunctious tune, “Blackberry Bramble,” to go with the art. Is the entangled man the fallen Lucifer with his once-heavenly harp? Who are the beasts? I don’t really know. I suspect that this illustration contains many possible stories. The Old Michaelmas legend merely suggests one of them.

Enjoy the illustration, and this little journey with blackberry and the old liturgical year, and if you play an instrument, you might try plucking out this tune. Then head out to field and forest to admire bold and abundant blackberry.

Oh, and if it’s past October 10^th? Leave any blackberries you find on the vines!

And here is where I play the tune on my harp. Enjoy!

Open Causes and Cures, St. Hildegard of Bingen’s medical treatise, and you find that it begins thus:

The treatise begins with cosmology, moving from the creation of the world to that of the angels, the fall of Lucifer, the creation of the soul, the elements and the firmament, and so on, to our more usual physical aspects of sky and earth. Book 2 considers the Fall of Adam, the creatures of the earth, and begins to explore imbalances, understood in the context of the elements of Earth, Water, Air, and Fire. In short, this part of the book is Hildegard’s version of the Genesis Creation stories, serving as the foundation for understanding the nature of disease, and essential concepts of health and healing.

And Causes and Cures moves onward, into five books total, detailing maladies and what to do about them, and various aspects of the nature of things in relation to men and women and health.

As we enter deeper into Hildegard’s text, and the landscape of medieval medicine, we find ourselves in a nuanced world. Winds and elemental forces are not only divine and seemingly abstract, but are actual winds and elements within the agriculturally-centered daily and seasonal life of men and women of Hildegard’s time, 12th century Europe. Like the foods we eat or the composition of soils when we garden, they form the building blocks and energies that make or break health. The simple act of stepping outside and feeling the sun on our skin and the warmth in our bodies, the brush of wind and the air entering and leaving our lungs, the brush of dew on our clothes and the moisture in our breath, reveals just what we are working with when tend to healing.

Perhaps the concept that captures the imagination most when we meet St. Hildegard and her medicine is that of viriditas, often defined these days as the greening power of nature. In her writings viriditas refers to “greeness,” a color, or as a substance “formed in the earth and matured by the sun” (as described by Gregory the Great) manifesting as green sap in plants. Unique to Hildegard, this notion of viriditas as a substance was applied not just to plants but to people as well.

In people, viriditas not only serves as a metaphor pointing to such spiritual qualities as truth, integrity, penance, and abstinance, but also as a physical generative essence, originating from the earth. It can show up in specific ways:

Hildegard writes:

and:

These are just a few expressions of Hildegard’s viriditas. In time, I’ll share more. For now though, let’s consider viriditas in our own lives, outside our front doors. Where I live, viriditas is in full generative exuberance. The plants surge upward, visibly taller and broader by dusk than they were at dawn. The trees are in movement, with successions of blossom sweeping through the landscape. Some weeks I see only pink blossoms, other weeks they are white , then yellow awakes. Leaves are new green and vibrant.

The birds are in full abundant song, the deer wander through, the does ripening with fawns. On the ground, bitter and mineral-rich herbs share their juicy goodness. These are all flowerings of viriditas, a substance that may indeed truly rise from the earth, infusing and vitalizing the plants and the trees, and the other creatures of the land.

Here in the Pacific Northwest, we know warmth and sun and rain, expressions of the elements that make up viriditas. We on our Island have left our woodstoves and cozy indoor corners, and are gardening, playing, resuming long walks with friends, and delighting in the gifts of nature. The Spring calls us to new ventures, renewed activity, inspiration, just as it calls to the myriad animals, plants, insects, birds, and other beings around us. All is active, all is busy, all is joyful.

Head outside and engage with the fullness of your senses. What do you hear, feel, smell, taste? What moves through you? Where does your body feel most alive? Where do you know hope? The earth is rejuvenating, and proclaiming the truth - all is new!

In the medieval mind of St. Hildegard of Bingen, in which the workings of the seasons and the earth and the year mingle with liturgy, prayer, and our human efforts, no real separation exists between the psyche and the spiritual, the garden of the human body, and the body of the garden. All derive from God, and all, in their rightness turn toward him, and are fed.

In the rightness of food, rest, proper action, virtue, compassion and attentiveness, obstructions fall away, and we - humans and more - can discover renewal within and around ourselves. This is the movement of viriditas, engaged in its daily miracle of life.

And this is the source and nature of healing - of helping another, and being helped in turn. This is how we release our outrage and anxieties and despair, and our imprisonment to what seem to be unending sorrows. God’s creation in its sweet and potent intimacy, can move even that which seems to be most intractable. God himself, the gardener, gently lifts us, enmeshed as we may be in all our anguished rigidity, and places us in new soil before him. He will nurture us like the precious seedling we are, if we, like a seedling, will allow it. Surrender opens us in the most unexpected moment, and the astonishment of actually being able to forgive can unfurl us into a new heaven and into ornate leaf.

It can happen in an instant, this divine mercy, within the surging, cleansing, rejuvenating river of viriditas, and the Heaven in Earth that is Spring. Here in the river, like a sunflower in adoration, we find ourselves in wild devotion.

And, in such a life, we know the wonder and wellness of it

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Resources

Rooted in the Earth, Rooted in the Sky - Hildegard of Bingen and Premodern Medicine by Victoria Sweet

Hildegard’s Causes and Cures - translated by Priscilla Throop

Herbs With Kids

Read my recent article, “Herbs With Kids - Springtime!” It’s not too late to harvest some of the herbs mentioned to make an herbal vinegar!

Joys of Spring,

Jane

Please enjoy this first post.

(Note to Subscribers: if you don’t wish to receive “Liturgical Herbs” posts you can switch them off in the settings for your subscription for The Book of Deer. Go to the “About” page and scroll down to find out how to do that.)

Spring is drawing near, and if you wander off the path into the feral corners of your yard, or in fields or woods, you’re bound to behold plants in new growth, and the sprouting of our beloved herbs. Many of these young weedy herbs are absolutely perfect to harvest now (just be sure to take the usual precautions. Learn some plant safety basics in my article here.)

Here in the Pacific Northwest and on our Island, we especially love to harvest Nettle. Our independent community newspaper, The Vashon Loop, recently reran this article about Nettle: It is Nettle Time! Read all about this plant’s many nutritional and medicinal benefits.

Last month, I mentioned that I’d be bringing St. Hildegard of Bingen (c. 1098 - 17 September 1179) into these pages. For those of you unfamiliar with Hildegard, she was an amazing woman of her times: 12th century German abbess, composer, physician, author, visionary, and a saint! Here in “Liturgical Herbs,” we’ll explore her medicine (though we may segue into discussion of her compositions, and other writings too!).

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Here’s some of what St. Hildegard of Bingen had to say about Nettle:

“Nettle is very hot in its own way" - in Hildegard of Bingen’s premodern Europe, the taste and actions of plants in the body were understood as having the qualities of hot, cold, dry, or damp (moist). Based on direct experience, this means of perception is foundational to many tradition-based healing systems, and is effectively worked with to this day.

Garlic and cayenne are “hot” herbs. Taste either one, and you’ll experience a blast in your mouth and a corresponding activity in your body. Nettle is “very hot in its own way” - a different way for sure than circulatory stimulants.

And, oh, my! Unless you know how to press the leaves in on themselves so as to break the stinging hairs, Nettles is “not at all good eaten raw because of its harshness.” Indeed! Be sure to blanche your Nettles, or cook them well in other ways before eating, to deactivate the stinging hairs. Nettles are an amazing mineral-rich food, and wearing gloves, or handling them with a tea towel can help you brave this plant.

As a spring herb, Nettle also helps clear the body of congestion (often referred to as “mucus” and “phlegm”) accumulated by way of the heavy foods and illnesses of winter.

I note this interesting comment:

This is why I love looking at old materia medica. Herbs were often used in a wide variety of ways that we don’t hear of today in Western herbalism. In reviewing Hildegard’s remedy above, we can recall that our skin is an organ of absorption. I can see how rubbing Nettle juice in oil on someone’s chest and temples over multiple evenings might ease forgetfulness. Bringing circulation to the area, with minerals absorbed through the skin, and so on, might contribute to this possibility. As eating Nettles can help restore vitality in the body, applying Nettle juice in oil, as Hildegard’s mentions, might indeed encourage vitality to the mind.

When exploring historical herbal practices, it’s important to keep in mind the usage and knowledge that we have today, and to center on common sense. If the historical practice seems reasonable, presenting no hazards, and the plant itself has no contraindications, you could give it a try. Use it yourself first - far less is more, until you get to know if you and the remedy are compatible. Build experiences of how it works or not, before sharing it with others.

In the meantime, whether you are fasting for Lent, or merely wish to tend to your physical health, consider incorporating Nettle into your diet!

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In the grand music that is the season of Easter, the month of May is dedicated to the Blessed Virgin Mary, Queen of Heaven and Earth.

As I mentioned in a previous post, “Beag ar Bheg: Little by Little”, in Sacred tradition, all flowers, plants, and trees reflect virtues and attributes of Mary’s life and that of her son Jesus, as well as other elements of the faith.

This tradition dates back to the medieval period — as does the custom of dedicating the month of May to Mary — and probably before. In the days before printing presses, it was common to experience one’s devotion within the mantle of nature, and to share that devotion in the form of tales and teachings.

Flowers especially are closely connected with the Blessed Virgin, she who is described as “a rose without thorns” - Rosa Mystica (Mystical Rose) - and the “Flower of the Field.”

Recently, I came across our Pacific Northwest native Violet, Viola sempervens, or Evergreen Violet. This lovely species of violet grows in woodlands, and we found a whole tiny colony of them strung alongside the trail. They are low-growing, with heart-shaped leaves. Violet, of course, carries some Mary lore.

Mary’s Humility

Called various, “Mary’s Modesty” or “Mary’s Humility,” one tale is that at Christ’s crucifixion, the purple violet bowed her head in sorrow when the shadow of the cross fell upon her, and has remained that way ever since. In the liturgy, purple is the color of Advent and preparation, but also of Lent, and for the Masses for the Dead.

I’m currently captivated by this tale of Violet as a flower of the Annunciation. Upon witnessing the Virgin Mary’s humble acceptance of the Angel Gabriel’s message, and her yes to God’s divine plan, Violet outside Our Lady’s window, blossomed.

Violet: A Poem and an Herbal Litany

Evergreen Violet
by Jane Valencia

As in the old fairy tales
I find myself wandering
the dark and tangle of the woods.
Violets line a trail
and we witness Blessed Mary as she passes by
Perhaps on the way to someone’s Calvary.

As she passes, your face is an illumination
miniature yellow petals reflect her Sun.
Your surrender to Divine Love
awakens joy in the depth of a hardened heart

From the dry spring
a gentle stream flows

Litany:

Violet, This is your medicine -
some of it anyway:

Lymph mover
Relaxing nervine
Demulcent
Mineral rich, food-like
Leaves and flowers in foods, tea, tinctures, vinegars, and honeys
(we do not include your roots)
Safe for infants and elderly, children and the delicate

Softener of cysts,
Soother of coughs and sore throats
One who eases headaches
Soother of fears, anger, irritability, and vindictiveness
Comforter to those suffering long-held trauma
Intercessor for those in implacable situations
Consoler of those caught in unmoving grief

Little handmaid to Mary,
We, who meet you in the garden and woodlands,
and who welcome you in windowsill planters, and
in our herbal pantry,
proclaim you.
Blessings upon your virtues, sweetness, and being

Violet, oh, small one
in the way that herbs do,
lend your healing to our bodies
lend your healing to our minds
lend your healing to our hearts
lend your healing to our spirits

Violet,
Thank you and God for your gifts.

For more information on Violet’s herbal medicine:

Sálchuach - The Many Aspects of Violet by Kiva Rose Hardin

How to Make Violet Syrup & Violet Health Benefits by Rosalee de la Forêt