red cedar

a mother medicine

🌱 🌱 🌱 Welcome to this edition of Wild Leaf, written from my home, from my heart and from the full spectrum that it all contains at this moment. 🌱 🌱 🌱

“Birth, death. Alchemy in the middle.”

Between the jaguar feathers and the hardened flecks of mud, among the medicine bundle that is becoming my living room floor, we are now finding the tiny green tips of Western Red Cedar, sprinkled here and there, beneath the chair and in the corners, under the wood pile and in our shoes.

My mom, bless her, sent us a box full of fresh, fragrant cedar from where she lives in Oregon, as a gift for the holidays. Buried beneath a layer of beautifully wrapped gifts, all tucked together with ribbons, was a vital green sea of freshly harvested cedar from the forest.

This weekend I finally had a moment to sit with this blessed box, with this being that is so fundamental to the forests of the Pacific Northwest. I began the slow process of refining the material, pulling apart the leaves from the long skinny branches, eventually filling two baskets to over-flowing with the fragrant stuff.

With each tug off the branch, an aroma was released into the air, a smell that took me right back to the roots, to the Mother, the forest.

Western Red Cedar is a Tree of Life.

Tribes in the Pacific Northwest traditionally use this tree for just about everything - from canoes to cradle boards, blankets to baskets, clothing, fishing traps, hats, coffins, food and medicine, this tree provides an exquisite spectrum of life-giving properties. (May we all strive to be like this tree.)

And I find it funny, my floor. Between the soft downy feathers of a recently deceased bird that is so often associated with death, there is now the sprinkled presence of this deeply nutritive, aromatic, life-giving tree, whose fragrance takes me into a deep, visceral landing of home, into the arms of the Great Mother.

Though its leaves are green, if you make a tea of this cedar, by slowly simmering it in water for a little while, the water turns red. And I read somewhere once, of a tribe(s?) native to this Turtle Island, who would give a baby’s her first bath after birth in a deep red, warm tea of this plant, pouring the water over the baby’s head, baptizing her in the way of the forest, in the way groundedness, home, protection, connection.

The Haida name for this tree is "X̱aayda”, and the Tlingit people call it "X'áat'á" or "X'áat'áx." It is known as a living spiritual being and a guardian of the forest. Evidence of its use among humankind dates back thousands of years.

Tlingit Baskets, Totem Pole, painted paddle, collection staged with Native American elder woman, ca. 1880-1900.

I can’t remember the last time this tree was in my hands, but I used to live among the cedars, near the ocean in the state of Washington. I remember once harvesting its leaves, silent in the forest, feeling like all my life’s mission and desire was complete in this single act.

Lifetimes away from the silent forest of my early twenties, today is different. I’m not standing in the dewy forest of the Pacific Northwest, among the soft moss and the unfurling ferns, singing in the gentle rain, humming, gathering the cedar to make the medicine. Today I’m holding these sacred leaves from a faraway place, as my chest heaves and tears flow like the Nile from my eyes.

Today my daughter is gone, with her papa in another home, with another family, a new family, her new family? Today, the tears don’t stop. They roar and rage. They have me wailing like the ocean winds and praying to the fire and collapsed on the floor like a limp noodle.

Today the Cedar talks to me differently.

Today she is my Mother. She welcomes my tears, my heart, my collapse.

Each leaf I pull from the branch releases a puff of that medicine fragrance which I breathe in, pulling it into my being like life-blood, like Christ itself. There are hundreds of leaves, hundreds of bursts of this deep red aroma from the forest. She offers me her breath, the breath of this holy tree of life.

I cry and I breathe, breathe and cry. Nothing is more shredding than another woman, another mother, and the lover of your ex, with your child. Is this too much? Too soon? There is a primal wrong-ness to it, an awfulness that I think only a mother can really understand. I wonder how we got this way, as a people, to normalize things like this, to be polite in our displacing of children from mothers, quietly excusing mothers from their children, how we have been so subtly, over decades, de-centralizing the Mother, the home, the forest; normalizing things that go against nature, against Life. Isn’t there another way?

Well, of course, I have a pretty good sense how we, as a people, as a planet, arrived at such a disconnected view of what “normal” looks like.

I guess the better question is, how do we get back? Back to the forest?

🌱 🌱 🌱

This is an offering to all mamas of separated, separating and/or challenged relationships — in fact, this an offering to all mamas, period. So often our children bear the weight of our unconsciousness and our just plain unknowingness. It’s a painful truth to bear. Too often the children are the karmic recipients of imbalance between and within each parent, being shuffled between the two, losing a sense of identity, clarity, rhythm, safety, protection, care. Too often the court implements radically damaging court orders, ruling from outdated books and one-size-fits-all ideology, ignoring the physiological bond of the mother-child dyad, or the need for a child to bond at all. Too often the child gets swept under the rug while the parents figure their shit out. It sucks, and I am sorry for all of it, because the children pay the price, and their children and theirs after. And like that, our planet pays the price.

So I am remediating my way forward, slowing down, centralizing presence with my child, protection, structure and predictability.

I trust in this remediation and I trust in this primal knowingness.

So, my invitation to you, if any of this applies to you, mamas and papas alike - is to: find some cedar. Touch it. Breathe it in. Make a tea and baptize yourself with it. Return to the forest. Offer your tears, as nourishment for the forest floor and for the generations to come and know that each and every moment of repair with your child and yourself totally, definitely, counts.

Hold the vision that the ancient, life-affirming wisdom of the Grandmothers returns to the overarching systems of earth, and quick - that the forest, the central Cedar of life, continues her process of assimilating humankind, back to their roots and to the principles of life itself, for the sake of the children, the forest and the waters of our beautiful Mother Earth.

In the meantime… I will let the bird take me into the underworld so that the cedar can pull me back out, up into a new world, with new roots, green leaves and a wild spectrum of life-giving properties that can carry my little nation (Amara) forward.

And so it is.

🌱 🌱 🌱

Thank you for reading this edition of Wild Leaf, an undulating landscape of meaning, poetry and what it seems to be a mother in these times. Please click the little “❤️” at the bottom of the page here so more readers can find this publication. Paid subscriptions support these works in a big way, thank you.

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