I have long been interested in Indigo and Woad especially since Woad in particular is connected to my more recent Scottish ancestors and given that Blue is a very important colour in the animist tradition I was trained in.

Indigo, the colour of the sky and water and the source of deep alchemical magic and revere across most of the world!
For some time now I have been gathering the ingredients and dreaming about what I might do should I set up an Indigo vat--mostly I had visions of deep Indigo drums, perhaps a shawl and of course the initiation into Indigo as seen with the classic "Blue Hands". Interestingly enough it is said that in India those with Blue hands were considered not of a lower caste as one might think, but rather if you were a dyer that knew the secrets of Indigo blue dying and had the tell-tale blue hands much respect was given!
I am notoriously known for my love of the colour Red and it's deep connection to the divine feminine, but blue has captured my heart and ancestral soul for the moment, so it was fun to combine both loves by setting up my Red Tent and Indigo vat side by side for the day!

Ok so here is the run down--basically Woad and indigo are the same, AND....woad and indigo are different, how is that for confusion!?

What is the same about these two is that the compounds in the leaves, when extracted, both produce blue pigment called Indigo.

From what I understand Woad is easily grown in Europe, thus the history of use there, and Indigo although referred to as the colour produced, is also a plant grown in more tropical climates, and the Indigo that is gathered from these plants is deeper then what one is able to obtain from Woad.

I imagine that a more lush tropical climate must be the reason for the compounds that create the blue colour of Indigo to be deeper then the Woad grown in Europe, but that is just a guess...
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The introduction of Indigo to Europe came by way of Asia is the middle ages they say as early as 1140, and initially it was was sold in hard lumps and used as an ingredient in paint for artists.
It was not until the 1500 that it started to be imported and used for dye which made woad dyers quite uneasy, however it seems that the use of woad for dye was slowly departed from as the darker colours of the more tropical Indigo were discovered.

It is said that where woad is a slow blue Indigo is fast, but the truth of the matter is this--both require deep alchemy in order to achieve any kind of lasting colour!

"In Europe and in the British Isles, when woad was the only affordable blue, processing began with the crushing and composting of leaves. The mixture was shaped into balls dried for storage and transport. Inside the balls, a tiny secret was at work: a bacterium, Clostridium isatidis, thriving in the interiors, using up the oxygen, beginning a transformation by fermentation that led to blue pigment.
Woad, the plant whose deep blue pigment was used as a warpaint by the ancient Britons to frighten their enemies, is to be farmed commercially in Britain for the first time in 500 years.
Large-scale production of woad, which was most famously used by the warrior queen Boudicca, finally died out in the 16th century when cheaper dyes imported from India made it uneconomic." Source 

Woad has long been connected with the Icenci tribe and it's famous leader Boudica who was said to have painted her face with paint before going into battle, and we now know that woad is also antiseptic and may also have been used to heal battle wounds! The thought with painting the face Blue was to frighten the enemy by having a fierce face done is a colour that would have been hard to achieve anywhere else. of course back then Urine would have been one of the magical ingredients needed to turn the green dye blue....

I could write an entire book on the ancestral connections between the magical dye and each country it was used in, fortunately there are many other wonderful and amazing books that have already done so...

From what I can understand the myth and magic of this alchemical dye has literally been found most of the world over, and ancient history shows that not only was it used for dying fabric, but also it was used for tattooing in Japan, for burial shrouds in Egypt, in trade as currency from Africa to to Central America and on and on... and it certainly not just contained to my personal European ancestors--so if this colour has captivated you as much as me chances are your ancestors used and wore it too!

Indigo was used to ward off evil spirits and the secrets of it's facinating alchemical process were guarded fiercely by those who would eventually pass them down through the family line, or sometimes passed through secret ritual and ceremony from one dyer to another in the line.

Because I am always interested in finding my own ancestral links and understandings I was fascinated by the use of Woad as a colour of warriors and in domestic use for dying wool and clothing as well as the idea of dying drums this colour for use in ceremony.

It is  said that the ancient Celtic Picts used woad for drawing on their bodies before battle and I found a fascinating book "Finding Blue" which goes into this history as well as giving a recipe and images for doing just that {see images below} but I have also read that this is not dependably accurate and so the search continued until my understanding-although not exhausted, has come full circle in that I now see that this line of my ancestors were an extremely adaptable and creative peoples {sounds familiar} and somewhere in it all lays a speckle of truth-and I am sure that speckle was Blue!

To this end I decided to ask my own helping ancestors directly and see what they had to say for it all, as they were also a pragmatic people who did not tolerate fools easily...

In the end I felt my connections deepened and I was shown a drum dark as ravens wings and used for a very specific purpose in death and grief work, which I have yet to make, as it will take more time, ceremony, and thought on my part before I even begin, as these kinds of things are not to be rushed in any way.

However, before all of this I enjoyed a few full days of dying and made a few sacred drums for sale which I have finally listed up in the Drum Shop Here.

What is the next Step:​
Lets start talking about Ancestral Recovery, about looking into bloodlines and stories and all the things that make us up as humans. Recovering our ancestral understanding is vital to the conversation, especially if we are going to be showing up to this problem, and meeting the demands for the creation of a new story.

Lets stop justifying our actions and simple make a change no matter how small, to step away from the ways we were taught.
That is to say, lets us break out of the patriarchal paradigm that says it has to be one way or another and begin to carve new ways of being!

If you live in Vancouver--come out to an event I am sponsoring on April 27th to learn more about Canadian Indigenous History-The Blanket Excercise.

We are all humans, and we all share this one earth, so the sooner we can stop dividing ourselves and start getting back to what is important, the sooner we can begin to repair some of the damage done to our earth mother.

I for one am excited about re-wilding myself even further, to visiting the lands of my ancestors, and deepening my connection to the land I live on here in Canada and learning new ways of being in right relationship to my ancestors.

I leave you with this quote by Carolyn Hillyer:

"What is the story of our forgotten people?
It is story of return. It is a story of hearthstones and home; of amber from oceans and copper from earth; of men who soar with buzzards and women who weave heron feathers in their hair.

It is also however, the story of ourselves; in a landscape where time spirals rather then runs ahead of us in rigid lines, we look to our forgotten people to remember something about our own lives.
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Remembering our own people, those who are connected to us by blood or clan, or land or any other bond that serves to entwine our hearts and souls, is part of rooting ourselves in our landscape and shaping the road along which we choose to travel. We learn from our ancestors in order to understand the ancestors we might become. "
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Footnotes:
Here are a few links to resources for those interested in diving into this more:
Origins of the word "shaman"
Awakening The Horse- Decolonization and ancestral recovery
White Awake-Awakening ourselves for the benefit of all
How privileged are you
​Layla Saad-A blog to white spiritual women

Somewhere around day five of our stay on a small island off the shore of south Vancouver I realized that the hold of the internet on me had somehow lessened and that I had not opened up my computer in days, and my phone was serving only as my camera..

My entertainment had officially become the local otters, herons, bald eagles, a small weasel that routinely raided the otters fish stash, a stack of books, and endless cups of chai and rounds of family cards and discussions on about every subject possible, learning new things about our teenage children and generally drifting into afternoon naps, dreamtime memories.

One of the side effects of these times for me, is a deepening of my connection to my own spirit guides and inner work, in a way no amount of disciplined spiritual practice can provide. There is something about retreating mind, body and soul that allows for other things to flow through from the spirit world.

As a spirit worker, I am constantly straddling both the spirit world and the mundane, being pulled into one or the other, and truthfully it is my family and the fact that I live in a busy city that more of then then not brings me back from some of the places I navigate on behalf of my clients.

​Out here though my senses are filled with a riot of beauty and stillness that no city can recreate, no matter now peaceful one tries to make it.

​It reminds me of a few different passages in the book Unlearn, Rewild by Miles Olson where he says:
"Every new technology brings a new dependancy, making us trapped.... and 'the internet gives people a toxic imitation of real-life connection.
He also says that "everything on this Earth is inherently wild. If it lives and dies it is a part of the wildness that is life. The keyboard I type these words on comes from different parts of this wild earth, tortured and mangled together into an image of this keyboard."
And this brings us to domestication...
"Domestication is the root of the giant chasm between humans and the non-human world, it is the engine that propels us towards killing the planet. Yet, some-how, it has completely snuck under the radar of the ongoing discussion on "Going Green", probably because it is a much more ancient and deeply rooted problem then burning fossil fuels."                               

And while I imagine that that most of us won't be leaving our communication devices at home anytime soon, nor stop driving our cars, and other forms of our own self imposed domestications, we can take refuge from time to time from our own self imposed domestic life and enter into what I like to call  Wild Unstructured Time,  for within this, we just may find that suddenly there is more room for the stories to flow...

You see in ancient times people did not have to "plan" for deep rest and unstructured time away from daily living. Once the chores were done, the day was done, and in the wintertime, stories flowed like water as elders and children sat around the fire to stay warm and entertained each other with stories from the warmer months of hunting, and other adventures.
In modern times we have leagues of ways to entertain ourselves, Netflix, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, heck the internet as a whole could keep one person occupied for an entire lifetime without the risk of boredom, or would it?

​As humans we seek deeper connections with each other, and for myself my connection with my children, the spirit world, and my ancestors are all fundamental to my reason for being here on this planet at this time.

However, if I cannot hear them for all of the distractions and noise around me, then I put myself at risk for illness to take hold as my connection breaks down and my soul wonders what it is here for if I am not going to fulfill my end of the bargain.

We need to enter into a conversation not only with each other, as humans, but also with the land we live on. We need to open ourselves up to hear what is is saying to us, or rather screaming to us about what is going on right now and it is not pretty.

Perhaps this is why we tend to stay away from wild unstructured time, true time away with no technology.

I myself have not yet mastered this idea, as I periodically check in on e-mails while away on vacation with my family, even though I have my "Out of office" reply on. So I am not claiming to have any answers here, only thoughts and ideas on how I can do better next time.

​​The one thing I took away from my time away this summer was just how easily dreams, ideas and stories came to me after a few days away from media, and just how important it is to my soul that I do this more often.    Yes, Wild places are indeed medicine for the soul...

Plans are now in the making for more time spent out in nature and more unstructured time for the spirits to talk to me, for my ancestors, dreams and soul to guide me in what needs to come next... but is it enough?

As I reflect now on how much longer it took me to reconnect this year, I also realized that during this past long winter I had unconsciously tried to convince myself  that since I was too busy to get out as much as I used to that media could be a good source for inspiration. I now laugh now at the absurdity of that hypothesis.
There is NO substitute for a hike in the mountains, a walk along the ocean, or a meander deep into the forest...none!

In our animist tradition we talk about the walker between, the one who walked with two feet in the ocean and two feet on the land {yes he was a wolf} and how hard it is to be a person who straddles both of the these worlds all of the time. As a Ceann-Iul, or walker between/shamanic spirit healer I often feel this divide deeply at times, and it is a constant discipline to stay grounded in and between both worlds.
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For those of us living in the heart of big cities, working and relating to both the spirit world and the modern world it is a hard task to straddle both with any sort of balance, and perhaps that is not really the point of it all, because at the end of the day city living will never be one of balance.

All we can do is make good with the spirits of the land we live on, honour them and do right by them in good integrity.

Many times I have received comments from folks about some of the images I show on social media about my back yard, and often they assume that I live in the country surrounded by woods and streams, but this is not so. I live in the heart of a large and quickly growing city, and I do the best I can with my small piece of land...
Part of this allows me to keep my sanity and the other fills my soul-gardening and beekeeping.

Here are two images, one showing just my small bee yard, and another showing just how close I live to other homes, in fact I have four homes on all sides of our small home here in Vancouver, and all but one are rentals, so it gets loud easily!​

Perhaps this honest sharing will inspire someone else to make their small pice of city land more wild and beautiful too... Heck if you do please share it with me!

I guess what all this musing has done is brings me back full circle to the quote by Mr Olsen, where he says "Everything on this Earth is inherently wild."
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Just like the earth does not take very long to re-wild herself in places where humans once were, it also does not take us long to tap into the wildness of our soul that is inherent, we just need to give ourselves more unstructured time and space for it....

In my healing and personal life I often reach out for what I call my ballast stones to ground me and bring me back to centre.
​
The story however, of how these sacred stones came into my life and work is interesting, and I often find myself sharing their simple wisdom with students and friends.
​
To do this though I must start at the beginning with a friend of the bees....

Many years ago in the spring of 2013 my dear friend Laura Fergusson the founder of the Collage of the Melissae called me up to share her most recent adventure with her bees. 
In this story she shares that she was caught out in a lightning and thunder storm while trying to gather up a swarm of bees.
The swarm as successfully gathered and allowed to rest for a few days before being placed into their new hive. At this time she noticed many tiny pebbles at the bottom of the hive and intrigued she gently gathered them up using small tweezers and took them back home.

Suspecting these were precious and rare, she began to do some research and found that when bees are caught in bad weather, such as rain and wind, and most especially if they have just swarmed they will pick up tiny stones and use them as ballasts to weight them down so they can make it back to the hive!
This is not common information, and really only gleaned from old books on the subject written by old time beekeepers.

To my delight a small parcel arrived in the mail some time after and inside I found the tiniest pebble wrapped in a small pice of cloth and placed lovingly in a vial. The stone was last touched by a bee and carried back to the hive, as Laura only used tweezers to touch it, thus keeping the powerful bee medicine intact.

I sat with this medicine for some time before deciding to journey with it, as the moment I had it in my hands it felt like a powerful shamanic tool.

What I needed to do was to ask what I was to use it for, and as always with bee medicine the answer was as simple as it was complicated....

Of course what I am sharing here is the short version of what took over a year from the time I first received the ballast stone gift in my hands, as these things sometimes require time to settle and speak...

The ballast is about balance, simple and yet hard to achieve especially when the winds and storms of life batter us around.
I was told simply to find my own ballast stone, and to hold it whenever I needed grounding and balancing.

Ballast stones were used as foundation in sailing ships, as the weight stabilized them and stopped them from tipping over as they began to unload the cargo into port.
River cobble stones of all different shapes and sizes were stored in the ship's hold near the keel to enhance stability, as the tall masts made them extremely top-heavy.
These Ballast stones were added or removed as the weight of cargo, supplies, changed and gave balance to the ship.

This process as I mentioned above took some time, and when I first saw the image of a ballast stone in journey it was tiny like the one sent me, so if course my first inclination was delight and surprise when I found the most perfectly round stone in my shoe one day and felt it was a perfect synchronicity and perhaps it was, but in a short amount of time I realized that it was simply too small for my big hands to give me balance of any kind, and so the search continued for something that would actually work for big human me.

To my delight the effect was instant and grounding as I sat with a bigger stone in my hands carrying it as I had see the bees in my journey do.

Over the years I have worked with my ballast stone and even added a second so that I have have one in each hand to hold, as I am not a bee I am human.
This story along with the wisdom has been shared around a few times with students and clients who all have said that the effects were instant and that they now too keep ballast stones on their altars for tough un-grounding times.

This year now a new medicine has come forward, an elixir that will combine the medicine of the stone with honey and other plant medicines that will serve to support the balancing and integration needed while journeying through changing the landscapes of our lives, both our spiritual lives as well as our external, busy changing lives....
​This process has only just begun, but I imagine that it will be ready to use by the fall!

I come from a long line of prostitutes.
This is a sentence I am often heard sharing within the circles of women I work with, and startling as it sounds, it is the truth, a part of my personal ancestral truth and pathway.
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My ancestors were also warriors and farmers, herbalists, midwives, beekeepers and so on, but to date some of the deepest most painful ancestral healing that I have been tasked with in this lifetime has been healing the wounds in my mother-line from prostitution, rape and the destruction of sex as a holy act.

Imagine it like a long line of matryoshka dolls running down through an ancestral line, each one fitting into the next, each ancestor affecting the one after, all the way down the line-like ripples on water....
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However, contrary to the kindly concept of matryoshka dolls, when a former ancestor does not cross over into the land of the dead taking their rightful place with the rest of our ancestors, they stay here trying to reconcile their lives through us--thus in a way encapsulating us much like a matryoshka doll.

How does this happen you may ask?
Well in the most simple terms, this can happen when someone dies a sudden, tragic or otherwise unreconciled, and the ways this can happen are too numerous to list here.

In ancient times this was understood at a basic level, and there were people in each village or area to deal with these kinds of deaths, a sin eater or healer who was known to work with the spirit world, a shaman or curandera who would work to reconcile the person and support them in their crossing over  process should it become a problem.

Over time, as these people died out, the ways were lost, or in many cases they had to go into hiding for fear of their lives. The memory of how to work with the living and the dead became something to be feared, something that was avoided because of it being too painful or because those who were called to do the work were unsure of how to do it anymore.....

What happens when our ancestors do not cross over can become a problem for us the living, and in many cases we just simply assume it is a part of who we are, part of our familial make up.
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For some of us, our family stories may sound as bit like this: All the men leave us, or drink too much all the women in our line are infertile, or suffer menstrual problems, or have gallbladder issues, they yell too much/ or are verbally abusive, physically abusive, they can never keep a job etc....

Over time these patterns begin to show up in our own behaviour, they come  out in how we in how we treat ourselves and those we care for, and do not really reflect who we actually are.

The unresolved life of our ancestors and the pattern that their death caused it in the first place basically  gets passed down as baggage for us, the future generation to lug around, and this can affect our lives, deeply.

I​n some ways, what it feels like is similar to the matryoshka doll, we feel as though we are covered in something we can't explain, something we can't break free from, like we are inside an invisible force, stuck.

For all the therapy and work we do on ourselves we just can't break free of the pattern, and over time this can cause sickness and disharmony in our lives.

These patterns are a tricky bunch though because they can feel as normal as breathing, they often feel like such a part of us, we no longer can even sense them, we assume this IS who we are.
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This is because when it is an ancestral issue, we are literally born with it, so when it comes to sensing into the pattern we often can't see it, because we literally know no other way!

In my shamanic practise, ancestral patterns​ often come to the forefront of what I see first when the spirits begin showing me where the pain first started in a client.

When I first started out in my shamanic work, I was surprised by this, but now I see it as a natural part of the flow between the living and the dead, and a part of what my personal gifts are in the shamanic realm.
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My understanding of how important it is to find reconciliation and clearing for the living and dead has become a big part of what I do.

Of course this could never have happened if I were not who I was, coming from a long line of farmers, beekeepers, herbalists and yes prostitutes and having worked hard to see that my own ancestral loved ones were cared for so that they could become helping ancestors, not ones that hold me or my children back.

My work as both a birth and death midwife has also shown me the beauty, and pain, that both life and death has to offer us, and it is because of having seen both doorways opening and closing that I feel so close to this work as a pat of my ancestral pathway.....

This work is something that I will be expanding into more in the next year or so, as both a workshop offering for those who are experienced shamanic journeyer's, and as small writing pieces such as this post.
Locally for those who come to see me in my shamanic practise ancestral healing is something that often comes through.
​ If you are interested in what shamanic healing looks like THIS LINK is a good starting place.

May all your ancestors be helping ones.
In spirit and love
Nikiah

I am standing in line to get our anti-Malaria prescriptions filled for our Africa trip, and when it is my turn I am served by a young black woman, and I hand over my prescription watching her as she eyes it quickly.
She looks at the prescription and then then back at me, clearly a white woman going to Africa—it says so on the paper.
Professionally she does little more then eye it for a moment, and then continue on with her job.

It has been two weeks since I arrived back home from the shamanic conference/gathering where we worked with the theme of breaking our hearts open and remembering that love is not something we "do" but rather it is who we are.
And so it came to be that my heart is soft from a week of gathering with community, but also with the news that swirls around us regardless of how much we "retreat", we can't avoid friends passing on, tears for those who lost their homes in the most recent fires here in Canada, the heartbreaking stories of loss, and the inner knowing that the road ahead is long and much tender heart healing will be needed.
During this time I had an inspiring conversation with TerraSoul and we were singing the praises of using and working with some of our favourite plant medicines Hawthorn and Rose as a tincture for the heart and soul, so it was not surprising that later that day she shared an inspiring photo of her city foraged findings of hawthorn flowers and wild roses, and I myself stepped out and into my garden to realize just how grand my own wild rose bush had grown during the incredibly lush spring we have been having.

 ​And so began my biggest harvest of Wild Roses yet some from my bush outside and some from the wild fragrant roses that my "mother-in-love" has in her own yard on the island and some bright pink ones from my front yard. Between all of this rose harvesting I settled on 2 medicines, one being a tincture and the other sweet wild rose jam.

For the tincture I mixed with dried hawthorn and rowen berries soaked in brandy with sweet Honey from my bees, rose quartz and a lot of sun soaked love.
My intent is to create a healing tincture that I can share with clients and friends in need of some soothing for their troubled and weary hearts.....

The jam recipe is a mixture of three recipes and the batch is tripled so I really was crossing all my fingers and toes that it would set, and fortunately it did! One of those recipe's can be found here.

This medicine will not be up at the shop, but sometime in the next few months it will be found tucked into the hands of those in need, mailed across the country, and shared sweet drop by sweet drop to those I come across in my travels in need of soothing for their tattered hearts, that you can be sure of!
If you would like to get your hands on a bottle of heart soothing bliss to have for your own, TerraSoulHerbs herbs will have hers ready in about 6 weeks or so too, so watch for it!

​Wild Roses: Roses are used the world over from rose jam in sweets, to ground rose petals rolled and dried into beads and strung onto prayer rosaries. Roses have captured the heart and soul of many spiritual traditions the world over, as a symbol of love and miracles.
It is often said that smelling the scent of rose where there are none, is the song of a spiritual miracle or massage from the spirit world, and many people have reported smelling the fragrance of roses after praying to their saints.

Rose is used to cure apathy for people who have given up, and have started to believe that it does not matter what they do, or that their fate can not be changed. These people are often stuck on the thorns in their life path, and this remedy is great to turn these feelings around.

Rose buds and hips for healing are used in teas, syrups and jams to prevent or cure colds because they contain much vitamin C.
Rose tea can also be used as gargle in case of inflammation in the mouth and the throat, and is great in the treatment of  stress, depression, sinus congestion, colds, digestive ailments, constipation, sore throats, coughs, swollen eyes, puffiness, broken capillaries, insomnia, and on and on!!

Hawthorn:“Hawthorn has long been used as a herbal remedy that is beneficial to the heart. The etheric signature of the Hawthorn is said to have a pulsation that is similar to that of the human heartbeat. Hawthorn has long been prized as a heart tonic, and the leaves, the flowers and the berries can all be used medicinally. The berries especially are the most effective. They act in a normalizing way upon the heart by either stimulating or depressing its activity, depending on the need, gently moving the heart to normal function. Hawthorn berries may be used safely as a long-term treatment for heart weakness, palpitations, high blood pressure and angina." Glennie Kindred

Rowen Berries: "In the past Rowan was valued for its ability to provide us with forewarnings and foreknowledge. It brings an increased awareness of outside influences, which may be affecting us, which we may have been unaware of. This is why it is such an important tree to communicate with. It brings a quickening of awareness of all our senses and abilities, on many different levels of our existence. If you are working with the Rowan, the messages which are constantly passed to us from the Spirit Realms become more obvious, as we become more open to receiving and interpreting these signs in our everyday lives." Glennie Kindred

​Sweet  Wild Honey: Humans have been harvesting the sweet comb and honey from the bee for millennia, drawn to the sweet taste, and how it makes us feel when fermented into mead as well as the healing properties that honey carries makes a prize worthy of the goddess.
Honey can heal not just surface wounds and burns like no other due to it's anti-bacterial properties, but is also heals a broken heart like no other can as well.
I have used honey for many, many clients over the years but I have to say that one of the most profound experiences was when I was able to give jars of it to a dear friend while she was dying.
The sweetness and texture of thick sweet honey really lifts the spirits no matter what is happening and I found myself filling the jar up over and over again. After she passed I went to visit her partner and he offered me the empty jar back, but all I could do was stutter that now he needed it, and that I would be back with a full jar.
Both of us needed sweet tea with honey that day and I was thankful for it's gentle healing ways.
If we can treat honey as a precious gift and medicine as it should be then both humans and bees can live together, sadly right now honey has become a harsh commodity that is killing our bee population, alongside the mass pesticides and other disasters that we humans have made.
Honey is precious and healing, as is the sting of the bee if we open our minds to more then meets the eye.
 
Rose Quartz:The fair and lovely Rose Quartz, with its gentle pink essence, is a stone of the heart, a Crystal of Unconditional Love. It carries a soft feminine energy of compassion and peace, tenderness and healing, nourishment and comfort. It speaks directly to the Heart Chakra, dissolving emotional wounds, fears and resentments, and circulates a Divine loving energy throughout the entire aura. Reawakening the heart to its own innate love, it provides a deep sense of personal fulfillment and contentment, allowing one the capacity to truly give and receive love from others. [Raphaell, 82-85][Simmons, 331][Hall, 236]

This past week-end while visiting my “in-loves” for Thanksgiving, Azra brought in some of the last of her prize roses for the table, and instantly the whole living room filled with their heavenly fragrance.  Honestly I wish each of you reading could smell their divine fragrance, for these are not any fragrant roses, because they smell like sweet rose honeyed candy!
All week-end I Zahra and I buried our noes into the lush roses that graced the tables, and were already feeling sad to leave them before the week-end was even over. Then just as we were sipping tea and enjoying the last that the evening has to offer the suggestion was raised that perhaps I might take one or two, and then I jumped up for joy because I have been wanting for years now to find untreated organic roses with this kind of fragrance to make sweet rose honey and rose petal jam.  And just like that a plan was set in motion, for I was gifted with the best thing–I was allowed to take ALL of the last of the large blooms from the garden home!
I was so excited, that almost as soon as we walked through the door I was pulling out one of my favourite cookbooks and stuffing my nose into the bag of roses to take the last few deep inhale of that sweet ambrosia.
In the end I decided to make infused honey–of course! and some simple rose petal jam, but really it is more like a paste.
The honey was easy, I set a small pot of last years crystallized honey on the lowest setting it would go, so as not to spoil the natural enzymes, and then added two big handfuls of rose petals and mixed them all in. I left the pot for a very short time, maybe 5-6 min’s not even really enough time to get warm, but the crystals broke down and made the honey runny again, and then I quickly poured it into my waiting bottle. This bottle will become sweet medicine elixir, and I will take small spoonfuls of it all winter long. This stuff really helps the deep winter blues let me tell you! I might even share some….

This honey paste will be used specifically for ceremonies, as roses are deep healers of the divine feminine. I often use roses and honey in my healing work with women who are tending to deep healing deep healing with their womb’s, and with their spirit. The sweetness of the honey and the distillation of the sweet roses are like the most soothing balm I could offer a women who is hurting. Both of these creations will become my offering in my winter healing work, for both myself and my clients.
In the meantime I offer you this poem by Mary Oliver…for she captures the bees and the roses with her words so well……

There was once a time, long, long ago, but not so long ago that it has been completely lost in the mists of time, that our young daughters were invited to sit at the feet of the elder women in the community.  There would be much laughter and “woman talk” and it was in this safe place that our girls would learn the secrets and mysteries of womanhood, eventually joining them in their rightful place as their minds and bodies turned from maidens to women and eventually, for some of them, into mothers.
As a young girl myself, I longed for this place, I always wanted to listen in on the conversations my mother and her friends were having, and if I sat still enough they would sometimes forget that I was there and go on talking about all the most interesting things….

When my first moon blood came I was the usual age of 13 and by then all of my friends had or were close to getting their periods as well. It was a rite of passage, a much anticipated event, and for me and my friends at the time, it was almost a race to see who got it first, heaven forbid if your best friend got hers first!  My mother like many mom’s of the 70’s and 80’s handed me a box of pads and told me to make sure I hid them from my father because he did not want to see “those things” around the bathroom. She did not shame me, but she also made it clear that it was to be hidden from men because it was probably a bit unclean

Fast forward 25 years I now have my own daughter and I like all mothers want the best for her. I desire for her to love her body, to have a deep spiritual understanding of how precious it is, and how deserving she is of all love.  I want her to feel empowered around her menstrual cycle, around being a woman, and how strong her body and soul can be if she gives them a little attention.
Here are a few hard and sad facts that our girls face daily: Girls between 11 and 14 see on average 500 ads a day. Canada has the 9th highest rate of bullying in the 13 year-olds category on a scale of 35 countries. (Canadian Institute of Health)By the age of 14 more than half (55%) of Canadian girls already feel pressure to be beautiful. Nearly half (47%) of Canadian girls between the ages of 10 and 17 have avoided social activities like going to the beach, participating in physical activities, going to school or giving an opinion because they feel badly about the way they look. (Dove) While 13% of Canadian girls (ages 10-14) are comfortable calling themselves ‘beautiful’, this number slides to 6% for girls ages 15-17 and to only 3% for women (ages 18-64); the percentage of girls who claim to be confident declines from 76% of girls 10-14 to only 56% of girls 15-17.
Given these sad statistics it is no wonder that supporting women and girls to change things is my life’s work! I desire BIG changes not only for my own daughter but also for the women that I work with, for the women who read our book and also for myself!
I owe it to myself and to my daughter to cherish her, and to show her how to have a healthy body and mind. This takes work, a LOT of work, because most our generation was not taught the old ways of honouring our daughters. For most of us it was a stiff upper lip as we were swept up in the wake of the early feminist era, as our mothers strived to show men, that we as women could do it all.  Many of our mothers held jobs and ignored their soft emotional post-partum bodies in favour of going back to work as soon as possible, menstrual pain was ignored or medicated in an attempt to show men that it would not slow us down! Wearing white jeans during our “heavy days” was a thing  to be proud of, and stuffing tampons into our vagina’s  so we could go swimming and generally participate in all the things that boys could do all the time something to aspire to.
As important as many of these efforts were in empowering ourselves as women, much was also lost and left behind in favour of this new way. We as women lost our connection to our bodies and to the ancient connection of sisterhood. We lost our elders and gatherings, and the initiations for our daughters to mark the transition from girls into amazing young women. These rites of passage are important markers, and it is my passion and desire to never allow any of them to pass my daughter by!

This is one of the many reasons I am so excited to be participating in, and bringing my daughter to, an upcoming event here in Vancouver called G-day.
“G Day celebrates this rite of passage by tapping into our collective sense of curiosity and bravery. G Day is more than a one-day event, it is a global movement that reminds us all of the journeys we take as women. We want to honour the secrets and wisdom that have been passed down from generation to generation, only to now find its way to you.
We are a sisterhood of girls and women. Together, we create a circle of common experiences and we see each other for who we really are. Our goal is to create a space where girls can come together and celebrate what makes them unique and also what connects them to each other.
When asked how we would transform a city, our answer was simple. Give us more space to laugh and to cry together, to share stories and rituals, to sit and to talk. Bring us together and the world will magically transform. And so we invite you to explore all of the wonders of womanhood on this adventure called G DAY. We guarantee you will come away feeling empowered, accepted and ready for the journey ahead.”
It is an honour to join my dear friends Madeleine Shaw one of the owners of Lunapads in this day long exploration of what it means to be a girl, how amazing and beautiful this can be, and how to navigate the often turbulent waters of puberty, peer pressure, and the messiness that life can bring a girl in 2014.