Together, they feel like a conversation between places I love. A little Parisian ease, a little Midwestern practicality. Timeworn, humble objects, beautiful imperfections, and well worn pieces that carry memories long before they arrive in our hands.

As we photographed this collection, I kept thinking about late spring itself—the abundance of it, the softness, the new feeling of doors opening and light stretching longer. This gathering of goods reflect that feeling to me.

For paid subscribers, here is a small preview of The Late Spring Gatherings, the newest Heirloom Edit for Hawthorn. The collection will be released online and in-store on Friday, June 5.

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I never made a flower essence from the tree. And the following May, it didn’t flower, and then we sold our house in June, one year ago. My life felt mired in layers of grief. For the loss of an uncle who felt like a father, gone too soon. For the people of the world suffering for generations, needlessly dying by the thousands. For leaving our home, our land, our dreams of what could be. My dreams for working the land and my hopes for my life path, quickly shapeshifting before my eyes.

Before we sold, while packing, undoing our lives, and ridding ourselves of what we’d accumulated through garage sales and endless sorting, multiple friends mentioned that a little spot on Main Street, a shop we all knew and loved, would soon be available for rent.

Over the winter, a group of friends had been gathering there for hot, sweaty, contagiously fun pop-up dances. It had been a lifeline. So I jumped in and threw my name into the running to rent the space. Not really knowing what I would do with it, my best friend reminded me of the little seed of a dream I had been carrying in my heart for a long while. A dream rooted in chasing this tree into deeper realms of connection, into experience, into living more and more from the heart.

She reminded me that I’d been talking about opening a little shop for seven years, give or take. The two of us sharing our love of thrifting and searching, hosting our annual porch sales and even years ago running a little Instagram pop-up shop to sell our wares. It took her holding that space, for me to recall my dream, before I decided to take the leap. The name came into my awareness first—Hawthorn, a heart space, a heart place.

Nestled in the heart of our town’s Main Street, it was an opportunity to bring my self to my community. I wanted to ground the avenues, threads of my work into the analog. I imagined bringing teas, tinctures, books, kitchen tools, trinkets, antiques, tangible goods with story and meaning. A place to weave together my love of the old, the heirloom, objects with heart, and art itself.

Before Hawthorn grew, before we rooted into a new homespace, we traveled in Europe to visit my sweet, sweet family. The loss of my uncle made our visits rife with a sense of urgency, ever the more important to forge our connections. We visited the partner of my late uncle and their sons in her native country of Italy. My other uncle, his partner and their new baby in France. Along the way, stopping to visit my daughter’s old kindergarten teacher, tucked into the hills of northern Italy. This odyssey began to heal my tender wounds of loss and revealed that home can be found in the people I love.

Along the way, we wandered markets and thrifted pieces. Unknowingly, those treasures became Hawthorn’s very first Heirloom Collection. Hawthorn, for me, is about sharing the heart of living. Holding the heavy alongside the everyday rituals that bring magic to the mundane. Hawthorn is a place to honor the thresholds, the unseen, the sacred found in the everyday, and the seasons of our lives.

To be frank, I’m still learning how to run a business, even though it’s in my blood. My grandfather and uncles ran a family business. My great-great-grandmother, Pearl, a Black woman born in Georgia to formerly enslaved parents, moved North and ran a business to support her seven daughters. While I may be stumbling and finding my way in this experiment called life, I feel guided by my heart, my bones, my blood.

This last week of May, the new owner of the home we built messaged me. It was time. Hawthorn was blooming and calling my name. After packing the children up for their last day of school, AJ and I drove those familiar country roads back to what we had left behind. We walked past the house we dreamt up and built and left, down the pathway alongside the abundant blackberry bramble in bloom, and toward the dried-up pond, where she stood in glory.

The dusky pink ribbon I’d tied in her branches as an offering was still there, dappled in the light. Tears welled in my eyes, not for what I’d lost, but simply to be in her presence at all. All of it, every bit of it, came rushing into my awareness. I could feel the moments of the last seven years that had brought me here, standing at her roots, offering an eye-shaped seashell.

I asked if I could harvest blooms for a flower essence. From the top of the tree, I heard the buzz of a hearty bumblebee gathering pollen. I collected the essence. A return to my roots, Earth Star.

And then it hit me, I remembered, this very day was the two-year anniversary of my uncle’s passing. Threshold days in these threshold times. And I felt that this seemingly serendipitous gathering was his gift to me.

I’m still ruminating on the lessons and perhaps Hawthorn was never something I was meant to find, but unearth. Perhaps she was teaching me that the heart’s path is rarely a straight one, that grief and beauty, tied up in endings and beginnings, the place of home and heart can exist in the same breath. Not to have a completely open heart, but with a protected presence to understand that love, abundance, opportunity, magic is available in every moment if we have the courage to see it. And perhaps that is the medicine I’ve been seeking and making and living into all along. Hawthorn imbues us with the strength to face our pain with courage as love lives on the other side. I cannot wait to work more with this essence and attune to the wisdom Hawthorn is ready to share…

In gratitude & connection, Alyson xx.

Hawthorn eluded me for many years, seemingly just beyond my grasp. When I first tumbled down the plant rabbit hole, in my little cottage garden tucked behind a picket fence, I fell head over heels for flowers. Akin to Alice in Wonderland, I could hear their whispers. Pansies and Meadowsweet dancing in the breeze, each with a song steeped in a meaning I longed to decipher, a calling home of sorts.

Hawthorn was a blossom I desperately wanted to encounter. For its magic, its mystery, I sought out its balm. For generations, folks have approached Hawthorn with reverence, knowing that it carried both beauty and unfathomable power. A keeper of boundaries, a protector of the heart, and a reminder that some of life's deepest wisdom is unearthed at the threshold betwixt grief and joy, endings and beginnings, the ordinary and the magical.

I remember a year when, driving down country roads in May, I would frenetically pull the car over whenever I spotted a lone flowering tree that resembled Hawthorn. I had learned to make and attune to flower essences from my herbal teacher, Asia Suler of and opened Earth Star Herbals selling flower essence remedies. In her teachings, I recalled she shared how she’d make flower essences from flowers she happened upon, often with nothing more than a water bottle in hand, ready to meet the moment as the medicine arrived in her life.

Asia writes:

“Hawthorn is a gatekeeper, healer, and protector of the heart. Our hearts are organs of perception, attuned to recognize life’s magic. Hawthorn helps nurture the heart so we can perceive the hidden realities that surround us and experience the enchantment of the earth.

As a protector of the brokenhearted, Hawthorn can help transform long-held trauma as well as acute heartache. This powerful essence helps regenerate hope and release grief, encircling the heart with comfort and protection. An essential ally for sensitives, empaths, and those who feel overwhelmed by the hurt in the world, Hawthorn helps us hold better boundaries so we can focus our energy on the heart-led work we’re here to accomplish.

In Celtic lore, Hawthorn was considered a literal gateway into the Otherworld. Hawthorn essence shows us how to walk the path of the heart-centered magician, learning to trust our intuition and perceive magic in the everyday world.”

My desperation and desire grew. I reached out to folks and farmers in our locale, asking if they might have a Hawthorn tree on their property. One replied “yes”, but that I had missed its blooms. He promised to contact me the following spring.

I waited, steadily.

Gathering groceries at our farmers market one spring, I scooped up the last Hawthorn sapling at a table and rushed home to plant it in our cottage garden. I watered it and observed it survive two harsh midwest winters, ultimately it never bloomed for me as we left that home and that enchanted garden, to build our country home.

When hiking on the land, ephemeral white flowering trees perpetually drew my attention, seeking. Apple, Wild Plum, and Chokecherry and none of them were Hawthorn, or so I thought. I settled for the dried hawthorn I could find at the co-op. Enjoying dried berries simmered in autumn cider, dried leaves and flowers steeped in tea, I yearned to cross paths with Hawthorn in real life, to bask in her vibrant medicine, to find out for myself. I even wrote a monograph about Hawthorn in my book, Our Kindred Home, accompanying the illustrations of my dear friend, Fran.

Two years after my copious failed attempts to grow and experience Hawthorn’s fresh blooms, in twenty-twenty four, life’s twists took me to Switzerland for the first time. My mother’s younger brother had been diagnosed with colon cancer shortly after visiting our home for a Thanksgiving gathering. Disbelief struck. His disease progressed quickly. By early spring, the July trip we had planned was no longer soon enough. A few days after my birthday, on April 27th, my paternal uncle called and said we needed to come and see him. My mom hopped on a plane from California and I on one from Chicago, and we landed in Switzerland to meet its beautiful, lush rainy spring.

At the time, we were still carrying so much hope that this wouldn’t be the last time. That he would find a way and that they would find a treatment.

On our walks to and from his family’s apartment to the hospital, I spotted a white flowering tree. And sure enough, I entered my first encounter with Hawthorn. This heart medicine I’d been searching for, for years. It was a relief, bittersweet, her presence assuredly meant it was my time.

A fortnight later, I returned home from my travels. My son and I were standing at the edge of the pond, together listening to the late May birdsong and he, attempting to catch tadpoles, when he noted an odiferous breeze.

“Mom,” he yelled, “it smells like death in the woods.”

I paced around the edge of the pond, which was littered with Wild Apple trees, and there kin stood. A Hawthorn tree, at the edge of our woodlands, tucked behind the Old Grandmother Oak I had strode past hundreds of times, stood a gnarled old Dotted Hawthorn nearing full bloom, a rare native variety, I would later learn.

It struck me like the fae had been playing their tricks all along. I, searching, seeking, longing for something that had been here all the while. Astonished, I screamed and rushed to snap photos of the tree. The moon was nearing full and a rain begun to fall. I planned to return the next day, in the sunshine, to ask the tree’s permission to make a flower essence.

Before I could make it back out, not a day later, my uncle passed. Grief overtook me.

The path continued on…

My life in the last few years has been filled with twists and turns (thanks Uranus in Taurus?). I’ve been learning to ride the rising peaks and dark valleys, but I’ve often felt like I was in survival mode, mostly. A layer of residue dulling my experience, I’m realizing, just like my camera, I need to cleanse my lens to see the experience all the more clearly. All the things out of my control, all the harm and utter lunacy of this built world, is sitting, bubbling just beneath the surface.

From traveling and talking to people from different countries, a thread has become clear: most people want peace. They want a safe home, access to shelter, clean water, nourishing food, and the opportunity to live as they choose.

And yet, so many of us are existing in survival mode.

When I’m in survival mode, my world contracts. I have less energy to give to creative endeavors, and communication is one of the first things that becomes challenging. Writing is one of my favorite ways to connect. Words float in and out of my consciousness, a palette to paint a picture but even that can feel far away when I’m stretched thin.

As we approach this full moon in Scorpio on May 1st, what’s surfacing from the depths of me is a siren call, a need for integration. These years have been filled with conflict, on the world stage and interpersonally, and within that there is an opportunity: to refine our values, to distill what is true gold in our lives, to remember our inner light. The grit needed to form the pearl.

But first, I think we need a vessel. Where, and how, can we find a safe place to trust and hold what ails us so we can make truth and light from it?

Scorpio is the alchemist, knowing which elements when brought together can create a treasure. It is the fecund, fertile ground from which Taurus’s material abundance blossoms. As spring burgeons, this is our chance to mine our shadows, to feel for what is ready to be brought to surface to see the light of the moon.

In Need of a Vessel

My life has become loud and bustling: running a shop, mothering, marriage, therapy (couples & individual), school concerts and plays, on top of the day to day tasks. I am wholly grateful for the experience of it all. And still, the person I am needs deeply quiet spaces. I need time to hear myself think, to remember how my voice speaks.

There is less time now among the woods and birdsong, so I have to listen more intentionally, ask for time to locate stillness. And yet it feels hard to gather the pearls of wisdom, the knowledge, the feelings I’ve been moving through this past year and bring them into embodiment. To make meaning of this mess.

This week, I attended my daughter’s fifth grade play, Into the Labyrinth, a whimsical retelling of the greek story of Theseus and the Minotaur. My daughter played Ariadne, who, out of compassion, offered Theseus a thread of gold to guide him out of the labyrinth even at great risk to herself. She went all in.

And it struck me how much this mirrors what I’ve been moving through, maybe you feel it too?

The labyrinth isn’t just a place of myth, it’s our inner and outer landscapes, depending on the day. A maze of confusion, overwhelm, the noise, the patterns that keep us circling. Survival mode can feel like being lost inside it of it all. And our thread, the golden thread, is our whisper, our knowing, and our inner light. The connection we return to when everything else feels disorienting, scary.

In the play, Ariadne didn’t fight the monster with force. Her curiosity, her willingness to question, became the guidance, opening doors; a way through. Thesues did not try to escape but faced the demon, and her kindness gave him orientation. The vessel was a thread of hope. A way to hold and move through. Because the edge of our aliveness is reborn from embracing the pain of separation, of seeing into our shadows. Not bypassing the darkness of the labyrinth, but allowing it to reveal what is true.

That’s what I’m being reminded of now: clarity doesn’t always come from pushing harder or doing more. It pours through connection, support, and a turning inward. It is revealed through deep listening, through honoring the subtle, yet persistent pull back to self. The depth enough to hear where the heart is pointing.

These last six months have shown me that I’m not someone who can go, go, go without consequence. When I do, my well runs dry. This Scorpio moon is asking to release, reconnect, to refill.

My way forward has to honor my own pace and needs, not to succumb to the rush of society. For me, to locate the essential means to strip away the superfluous and return to the core of my being.

Because we cannot hear ourselves with all the noise. With all the chatter, the talking heads, we become unmoored, lost at sea. The thread of our inner light is what holds the possibility of guiding us out of this daze.

And that also means sitting with discomfort. Looking at the patterns that keep us stuck, that pull us away from our aliveness. Taurus season, while lush and abundant, can also hold stagnation, stuck in the muck and the mud. And Scorpio can linger there too. I’m remembering the ways that support me: movement, acupuncture, and the plants. The things that help break up stagnation and create new portals in the body and the heart.

This moon asks us, honestly and earnestly: what are we still haunted by?

Let this full moon in Scorpio illuminate what is asking to be seen. For me, it’s been a call to step out of the overanalytical workings, the turning gears of my mind and root into the heart, to the body. How can we let the grief we are sitting in motivate us to build the containers and the vessels needed?

So the vessel also has to be something that can hold discomfort without rushing it away. Not to fix it, not to manage or solve it. To just stay, trusting we will find our way through.

Process, Release, Alchemize.

I think it’s less about choosing the right vessel and more about noticing which ones you’ll actually return to when things get loud, to pour out what needs release and to fill you up with what nourishes. A vessel only works if it can hold you consistently. Taurus speaks to how simple things matter. Vessels will likely need to be easy, repeatable, and sensory, not aspirational. Here are some shapes a vessel could take, in your language and in your world:

A daily pocket of quiet (time as a vessel)
Not a whole hour but something you can keep up with. Ten minutes in the morning before anyone needs you. A cup of tea, a window, the light streaming in, a page in the journal, meditations on a flowers. The consistency is what makes it a container.

Writing as a living vessel
Not for output, not to share, just to empty. I fall victim to believing everything I write might be shared one day. What would it look like to return to writing just as an emptying. Stream of consciousness, fragments, single words, no performance or standards. A chance to Let it hold what your mind keeps circling so your body doesn’t have to.

The body as vessel (movement + stillness)
Walking without destination. Getting down and stretching on the floor, on the grass. Even simply, placing a hand on your chest and breathing. Letting sensation metabolize what the thinking mind cannot grasp.

A relational vessel (being witnessed)
A therapist, a trusted friend, your partner but with intention. A space where you’re not managing or performing or worried about what it looks like. Just being seen and held in real time.

Nature as a remembering vessel
Even if it’s less accessible now, small moments still count. Standing outside at dusk. Listening for the robins call at dawn. Touching something living and allowing the connection regulate you back into yourself.

Ritual as a container
Simple, repeatable acts that signal “I’m here now.” Lighting a candle before writing. Pulling a card. Making tea with presence. Ritual turns ordinary time into held time.

Creative fragments (not full expression)
Remembering you don’t always need full projects, right now. A line, a color, a thought and impression, a question to follow. Let creativity come back in pieces, it’s still alive there.

I hope this moon missive finds you well, I’ve missed you.

In gratitude and connection, happy Full Moon in Scorpio, folks,

Alyson

We are standing at the edge of a rare overlap of fires, cosmically and literally, an existential crisis point.

THE HUNGER MOON

A Full Moon in Leo, bright, unflinching, rises opposite the Sun in Aquarius as our hearts face the horizon line, our pulse meets the pattern underlying our worlds, asks what are we hungering for? This lunation illuminates the tension between the individual and the collective, this conflict, the sloughing off of our final skins.

With all we are faced with, we can no longer be who we were, and we shouldn’t expect to be. We are rubbing against the truth of this reality and there is no turning back. Who am I when I am fully seen? And how does my light serve the world, not just myself? Leo calls us to inhabit our aliveness, to honor the heart and courage that pulses through our beings. This is our awakening. Yet, Aquarius reminds us that no flame exists alone, that brilliance is only sacred when it laced the wider web of connectivity. How can we allow this energy to shake up what is stagnant within us? What keeps up from ourselves?

Together, they ask: how can my gifts, my passion, my heat, my rage, be an offering? How can I add the creative fire of my one heart to ignite the hearth of the commons? Instead of swallowing my rage, my passion how can I channel it into inspired action in the worlds around me?

..

Imbolc falls roughly halfway between the winter solstice and the spring equinox, around February 1–2. It is one of the old cross-quarter days of the year, a point to honor time and marks the subtle shifts of the seasons rather than their extremes. Unlike the exuberance of spring or the abundance of summer, Imbolc is subterranean and liminal. Asking us to take notice as Life stirs beneath frozen ground; as the first sap unseen rising in trees, the milk beginning to flow in ewes before lambing season. Care becomes an act of faith before the verdant new growth is visible. It is a time of preparation, tending, and patient awakening. Not a time of great actions but the quickening lets us know what is near.

The festival has deep roots in Celtic and Gaelic traditions, where communities would honor the return of light and the slow increase of warmth after the long, cold nights of winter. Fires were kindled in homes and sacred spaces not as celebration alone, but as markers of protection, guidance, and cultivation of life in the dark months. In these earliest weeks of the year, survival was intertwined with care, attentiveness, and ritualized attention to what would grow. We see this playing out across the landscape, from Minnesota to Maine.

Central to Imbolc is the goddess Brigid, a figure of fire, fertility, and creativity, whose presence bridges domestic care and sacred inspiration. She is a multidimensional goddess: healer, poet, smith, her domain both the hearth and the forge. Her flame is both literal and symbolic, representing warmth, insight, inspiration, and the courage to bring one’s gifts into the world.

While a goddess, Brigid’s role in Imbolc is deeply human, she crosses thresholds, between the tangible and intangible, the seen and the unseen. She embodies the important work of care required to birth new life and new ways of being, literal, creative, and spiritual, into existence. To honor her is to notice what is stirring beneath the surface and to feed it gently with attention, courage, and love, allowing the next phase of life to unfold naturally. In the quiet work of tending the hearth (home), the forge (alchemical process of fire), and the well (our waters and wombs), we remember that transformation is a practice, not an event, and that small acts of care ripple outward into the world. She stands as an archetype and reminder to guard our visions, voice, and hope like a sacred flame.

AN INTERSECTION OF TIME

As the Year of the Snake winds to a close, we are still in the discomfort of what it means to be a being thats undergoing transformation as skin loosens, old identities and strategies that served as survival, that once kept us alive are suffocating us, and we have no choice but to let them be stripped away. Shedding is rarely painless requiring our honesty, our humility, and our courage: courage not only to survive, at the edge of birthing. You are a changed being.

Soon after, on February 17th, the Fire Horse arrives baring a cycle of momentum, risk, and embodied action. Fire Horse does not move cautiously, it moves truthfully. It demands alignment between instinct and integrity. What is false cannot ride; only what is alive, what is authentic, can hold its pace. The courage cultivated now and throughout the last year of the shedding, the tending, the conscious practice of presence is what will allow us to saddle this new energy with clarity and grace.

This full moon is the last lunation before eclipse season. Eclipse season arrives simultaneously with the Fire Horse on February 17th. Eclipses rearrange the architecture of our lives, revealing what must go, shaking out the cobwebs of what cannot stay hidden. This Full Moon offers a pause, a respite of sorts, a moment of reflection to take stock of our gratitude, of who we’re becoming, of what work is still required of us, to discern what can no longer still around, to cry, to feel into the rage that lives in our bones and dream…to envision ourselves, our light full unburden, to ask ourselves with honesty, what is ready to be released so that my light can burn for others as well as myself?

This full moon is in Leo. Leo is the sun, the heart, not in a performative or polished or armored way, but the raw center inside that fuels, knowing what a task and force love is. It also knows what it can no longer carry and what it wants to offer so freely.

The Sun itself is in Aquarius. Aquarius is the field, the social mind, the network of human hearts and hands. It asks: how will what I bring my courage, my creativity, my vision intersect with what others need? The answer is not perfection, often nor in grand gestures. It is small, deliberate offerings: attention, warmth, and steady presence. This is where individual brilliance knits itself into collective transformation. Like the many hands at work, providing shelter, safety, meals, protection out of pure love for humanity. How can we sustain this work? Caring for ourselves and caring for others.

Imbolc has always been about this subterranean work. The ground of being stirring underneath the snow. Life choosing itself again and Brigid does not demand transformation. She teaches the tending and care that allows it to grow. Becoming is not an event, her reminder to us, it that is a practice.

Here in this threshold, this corridor, we can see multiple realities coexisting. We can taste the potent medicine of duality. The work of existing in what is while tending to the dreams of a new world coming into being. The future can seem daunting, but our sovereignty comes in the fact we get to decide the shape of the new world.

The Snake year taught us shedding: sometimes cleanly, often painfully. It taught us to endure, adapt, survive. As it completes its spiral, it asks one final offering: the version of ourselves that learned to persist but forgot to trust movement.

The Fire Horse will not wait for hesitation. It carries speed, heat, instinct, and risk but only truth can ride. What you bring into that year must be alive, not armored. How do we feel the fear yet continue our journeys? How can we alchemize the spark of urgency channeled into stamina, a sustained glow like the sun, to fuel this year ahead?

This Full Moon illuminates what is ready to be released so courage can be felt again. Not courage as dominance nor courage as certainty, but courage as presence to show up, and the willingness to stand with what is true, even as the ground shifts beneath us.

A SMALL RITUAL

Light a candle in the snow. Allow the flame to thaw the ice and snow. Place your hands over your heart, or against the earth. Name silently, scream it out, or just aloud, one habit, fear, or pattern you are ready to release. Let it rise through your belly, through given voice with your breath, infused with your heart, out of your mouth your hands, into the moonlight. It becomes the felt sense how your heart and passion can create change when you give yourself over to ideas, dreams, and desires.

Then, name one way your heart’s fire can touch the world: an act of generosity, attention, service, or creation, imagining a world of abundance and safety for all. No vows, no forcing. Just warmth applied where life is stirring, culminating before growth. This is how individual light becomes collective illumination. Dream…

For ice relinquishing its claim on the Earth. For pressure easing enough to allow lift. For tending the small flame that will one day need to burn through what is no longer needed. If something cracks in you, it does not mean you are breaking, you are breaking open so more light can pour through. This is a turning point. Realities are splitting open, we wait with fortitude, persistent, for the season to change. How do we feel the fear and move anyways?

Tonight, let yourself ask:

+ After all this time, what am I still carrying out of habit rather than devotion?
+ Where has protection hardened into constraint?
+ How can I use my gifts, my ancestral technology of imagination to serve the whole, not just the self?
+ How will I care for what is already stirring so that my light may feed the world?

The clarity will arrive when it is time, at this point you only need the honesty and warmth enough to kindle your fire, to keep it alive, and allow it to light the candles of others. Here in this corridor we can trust the sun will return, the wheel will shift. Underfoot, the thaw is already beginning.

CURRENTLY READING

How to Fall in Love with the Future: A Time Traveller’s Guide to Changing the World by Rob Hopkins

This book serves as an invitation to remember the future as a living field we are already in relationship with. Moving beyond prediction or strategy, Rob Hopkins asks what becomes possible when we allow ourselves to feel forward when imagination is treated as a sacred and ancient technology, a form of devotion to life yet to come. A reminder time is not linear and we can work with it to our own advantage to shed cynicism and the misanthropy of these current systems. Through storytelling, memory, and collective dreaming, he reminds us that hope is not naive but practiced, tended like a small flame in dark seasons. To fall in love with the future is to act in service of it now, to let our vision soften fear, regaining sovereignty and to align our present choices with the worlds asking to be born.

In solidarity, love and gratitude. Alyson xx

P.S. I’ll be participating in this year’s Herbal Academy Virtual Herbal Conferences, February 15-20, 2026. I’ll be joining a panel on Alternative Plant Therapies, sharing my work with flower essences as a form of care for moments of transition, grief, shedding, and reorientation. Flower essences meet us not by force, but by resonance, supporting the subtle shifts that precede visible change the same way sap rises before buds appear.

This gathering brings together a wide constellation of herbalists and plant practitioners, each offering a different way of listening to the living world. It is a space where knowledge is not only transmitted, but tended where learning unfolds like a slow warming, rather than a demand for mastery.

The conference is free and virtual, an invitation to enter gently, from wherever you are, and to remember that healing and transformation are practices of attention, patience, and care. If you feel drawn to the earth medicines, the ones that work at the threshold helping us loosen old skins and nurture what is ready to emerge I would love to meet you there.

Meet Us There

Remember, remember, this is now, and now, and now. Live it, feel it, cling to it. I want to become acutely aware of all I’ve taken for granted.

Sylvia Plath

This year of the snake has felt like a huge question mark, no joke. An upheaval of the very foundations of what I thought I knew. Deeply unmooring. I shed comfort and familiarity, beginning with the decision to sell the house we spent years dreaming up and once believed would hold us forever. I released time and commitments in this space and other online spaces so I could hurt and heal in privacy, leaving behind the impulse to perform my grief. I shed comfort and familiarity.

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Letting go of the land and the home felt like leaving behind parts of my identity. I am still in the process of re-membering my self, gathering the scattered pieces slowly and deliberately. I have returned to the people, places, and plants I loved before, trusting that what is true will recognize me again. Through loss, this year revealed unexpected openings: invitations to take new paths, to soften into belonging, and to loosen the grip on old ideas of who I am supposed to be. None of this happened quickly. I spent long stretches feeling stuck, overcome by tears more times than I can count.

Care Beyond Self-Sufficiency

Cancer, as an archetype, governs home, memory, lineage, and emotional safety. Under this moon, I see clearly the places where I have learned to be self-sufficient, where I have told myself that I am fine on my own, and where those protective instincts have quietly kept my needs from being deeply met.

I begin to wonder: is the way I care for others the same way I care for myself— do I allow myself to be cared for at all? Do you extend the same care to yourself that you so freely offer others?

When I listen closely, care reveals itself not as maintenance, but as daily devotion, turning attention to what I value and to what matters and to what I love. It is a fierce attentiveness to what is tender and alive. Can you or I see or honor that love and aliveness within ourselves? Yet I also recognize how my devotion to self protection has taken the form of walls, built slowly and unconsciously, over time and through tumult. Those walls, I felt, kept me safe, but they also kept me untouched.

Belonging asks for something else entirely. It asks for a softening that allows light and reflection to permeate, a moment of recognition when we see parts of ourselves mirrored in another, requiring the courage to be seen, to be more vulnerable and to allow another’s presence to rearrange me. To belong is to accept that I may not remain intact in the familiar ways I have relied upon.

Surrendering Control

This year, I found myself teetering on the edge of breakdowns and breakups. A threshold year. In those moments, I learned to surrender to the alchemical processes of change rather than try to control outcomes. There were times when life felt like more than I could process. But more often than not, the joys, the experiences, the aliveness, the connection with new and old kindred hearts outweighed the sorrow. It was in this messy, murky in-between that I learned how not to micromanage life and instead become a vessel for it to move through me.

It was in that uncertain, in-between terrain that I learned how to let experiences move through me rather than harden against them.

Different situations and scenarios illuminated how difficult it can be to let someone work their magic on me. To trust that I don’t need to manage every outcome. To believe that care can hold me without consuming me. I had to breakdown, to surrender.

Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror. Just keep going. No feeling is final

Rainer Maria Rilke

Magic often arrives from the vast nothingness, the void in between the fear and the wonder, when we least expect it.

When I listen to conversations about manifestation especially through a Western lens it often centers individualism, control, on directing reality through will and effort, and so little reverence for care, belonging, or interdependence. That narrative has never matched my lived experience. The most meaningful shifts in my life didn’t come from force. They arrived through tending to relationship; to being softened, protected, and shaped by other forces, human and more than human love.

Reimagining Home and Belonging

We are taught, often subtly or not so subtly, that care and love are scarce resources, that tenderness is costly, and that self-sufficiency is the highest form of strength. Under this Cancer full moon, in this current political climate, and in this new year, those teachings feel thin and worn out, ready to be tossed for a fresh start.

This holiday season, I spent time with my family, traveling along the coast of California and visiting the places where my father grew up and where I spent summers with my grandmother. Touched by sandy landscapes of memory and belonging, with each swell of the salt kissed waves, I felt a sense of home returning to my body. After a year of profound change, and after releasing the home we built, I realized that home has been calling to me in a multitude of forms.

I find myself asking what becomes possible when home is no longer defined as a singular place, but as a constellation of people, plants, landscapes, and memories?When home is understood as the places and beings our heartlines have crisscrossed, the lens of our belonging widens. It becomes less about possession and more about relationship and a connection that cannot be so easily severed.

The Magic of Reception

I continue to imagine a different kind of surrender, one that is neither collapse nor erasure. A yielding that creates space for something new to arrive to inhabit our hearts. I wonder what might change if I stopped pushing so hard, striving for my heart’s desires, and instead allowed softness and pleasure to guide me.

To me, magic has always felt less like command. The way our feeling is translated into form through our hands, hearts—our human expression. Yet this magic has grown harder to access in a world that is increasingly mediated by technology, accelerated by consumerism, automated and disembodied. Our attention is fragmented, our intuition becomes deadened and our creativity is outsourced what is left in our well for us to create? The power of dreaming is diminished. Even winter, once a season of inwardness, now competes with constant illumination. How can we breathe life into ourselves and each other? Allowing ourselves to be emptied, to be filled up. The waves crashing upon the shore and receding.

I wonder how we can truly co-create if we only make room for our own effort, and not for community, collaboration, or for the inspiration and influence of the world around us to participate in the expression of love and creativity. I think what fades in this climate is the intimacy of making.

The knowledge to work our magic, I wholeheartedly trust, still lives in our bodies. If we can get really quiet, we return to what moves us. These technologies of care are the ways of expressing our humanity: making meals, painting a sunrise, in crafting, through touch, making love, and in the fulfilling satisfaction of using our hands to nourish, repair, and build. They are the spells we cast through touch, rhythm, repetition and presence. These acts return me to myself even as they weave me into the web of what is expansive, larger than my singular being.

Practicing Reception

In twenty-twenty five, I found I no longer wanted to capture and curate every moment of my life. I wanted to inhabit my moments more fully. As I look through the door of twenty-twenty six, I know still want to create and share, but I am seeking a more honest balance and I'm discerning the direction in which my attention is pointed. Sorting through photographs recently offered me a space for reflection and reminded me, Winter, is not meant for rushing ahead. This season is a time for integration, for releasing our grasp, and for settling into the uncertainty of what comes next. What comes when we allow ourselves to swim in the diffuse waters of dreaming? This sacred threshold asks to be honored not rushed through. It asks us to remember that doing is not the only way life and experience moves through us.

This year felt like a quest. Despite my environment, and despite the chaos of this changing world, I came home to myself.

This January, I am practicing the art of reception. Relinquishing a need to control. A resolve to trust in something larger than my self. Embodying the belief that softness can be generative and that fierce care does not always require armor. I am remembering that meaning does not always arrive through striving, effort or will. Some things come only when we make space in our hearts, and soften enough to receive them. Not all intentions need loud declarations. Some work best when entrusted to time, ancestors, nature, and silence.

And perhaps that, too, is magic.

There are years that’s asked questions and there are years that answered

Zora Hurston Neale

I wonder what this year holds, for you & for me: questions or answers…

If you’ve read to the end, thank you for being here and valuing my words and work. Thank you for sticking out the rollercoaster of twenty-twenty five.

in deep gratitude & friendship, Alyson xx.

Time is not just passing in a linear sense— it welcomes a deepening. Each Winter is an invitation to be less reliant on an outside source for fuel but a return to an inner light as source, within our selves and one another, and each return is new because we are new in each moment.

The shorter days naturally shift our attention inward. Many cultures associate Winter with introspection, stillness, and waiting. The children from grades one through eight greet the spiral each year from their current and changing perspectives. They wait their turn, patiently, to light a candle while the adults witness and attempt to hold a sacred, still, and solemn space.

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It’s such a pleasure to watch, as each year passes, how their relationship to the spiral shifts— their pace, sense of calm, and their demeanor have changed as they navigate the awkward phases of growth spurts and move more fully into their forms and bodies. The spiral truly becomes, for each of them, an invitation inward. Their flames wavering after lighting. How delicate is your inner flame? How does the outside world infringe upon your capacity to hold light?

Each time I arrive at the space, the one-room schoolhouse that once held the entire school, I’m struck again by the frenzy and noise of our outside adult world. It is requested we put our phones on silent or asleep, but the pull to check the time, the messages, whatever I might be missing is so strong, the hypocrisy apparent between the self importance of our built world and the gentler one we are attempting to cultivate for our children. How challenging it can feel to offer an hour or more of our undivided time to these children and to stillness, as I grow antsy in my seat. Each year, if I’m honest, I notice how my attention span is dwindling with my increased of use and dependence on technology, how patience is hard to come by, and how my participation as witness steadies my nervous system into a less hurried rhythm.

Our children are growing like bean poles, and the longer I’ve occupied online spaces I find, out of privacy, I share my experiences in motherhood and my reflections less and less to protect them and honor their own lives. This event, however, carried me back into my early years of mothering— watching nervously as they navigated the spiral, fingers crossed they didn’t light anything on fire, I’ve watched their confidence and assuredness blossom over time. I wonder what it feels like for them to greet this ritual year after year, how it might anchor their being in place and time on the wheel of life, season after season.

Some children rush through the evergreens, stones, and shells spiral to light their candle, held firm by an apple in their hands, only to realize once lit that they must go at a slower pace as to not to extinguish their flame. I ponder how I can apply this reflection in my own life. How can we slow ourselves way down this time of year to nurture and protect our creative flame? It goes against the mainstream current. The built world seemingly hell bent on diminishing our hopes, creative potentiality, and sacred fire. How can we walk more tenderly throughout our days to kindle the trembling light within? This season signals a period of dormancy and gestation, not a time to push ahead.

Each year I try to take this lesson to heart, and each year it feels like time is flying by at increasingly rapid speeds. I wondered if our experience of time is more informed by our own perceptions and conditioning than the actuality seconds and minutes? Winter reliably returns every year; a cue that time is truly cyclical, not linear, as dominant culture would lead us to believe. Time is a repetition, a dance between decay and rebirth.

All I can say is to call ourselves inward— to turn toward what is nourishing, to lean into the darkness and stillness to stoke the light, is essential. It speaks to me of our human nature to hibernate this time of year, to honor rest, to find quietude, not to attend all the social gatherings or strive to be the most and do the most. As we approach the still point of the solstice, the center of the spiral, how can we, too, take our turn to exhale and release the burden of expectation and perfection, to accept ourselves just as we are, right where we are? Winter is full of latent possibility; while nature appears asleep, underneath the surface seeds are held in potential.

In the end, light will inevitably find it a way towards you.

How can we cultivate spacious quiet to nurture our dreams and visions for the future?

xx, in gratitude and camaraderie, Alyson.

December 4th, 2025 | The clouds loosened their grip, and for a brief, merciful moment the apricity of winter sun lingered on my starving skin. Just as swiftly as the sun departs, moon light takes her turn lighting the way: bright, unbothered casting impossible colors against the stark glittering snow. A reminder that contrast is its own kind of mercy. What arises from within the hushed stillness of freshly fallen snow?

In my many acupuncture sessions, a place that regardless of what chaos is manufactured, I can locate a deep stillness. This fall, we’d identified a meridian connected by a thread from my heart space to my throat. She described it as plum pit chi, like a plum pit was lodged in the center of throat at the back of the tongue, blocking my being from full expression. A tight kernel of what hasn’t yet been spoken, felt, or released.

I felt this gracious Gemini full moon pulling the tight bundle of repressed words forward, asking for honesty and pleading for movement. What words need to be detangled, repurposed and strung together, woven into a cloak of truth and safety? It doesn’t have to be polished. It doesn’t even need to sound good, it just needs to be said.

As a Gemini moon + a Sagittarius sun, sing out across the sky, their duet urges us toward honest expression and a wild expansion.

Let love lead, anyway. Often, the psyche needs friction, to be stretched, pushed beyond its comforts, beyond the safer versions of stories we’ve rehearsed and into the edges of aliveness. That’s where I often, begrudgingly find growth. Not by abandoning the unkempt parts of ourselves, but by gathering them, integrating them, and refusing to exile what aches, instead pouring it a steaming cup of tea and asking it for its perspective, why it feels it needs to stubbornly stick around to keep us safe.

This moon is a fierce reminder you can free yourself. Under the moon, howl out to summon your power back, stand with steady roots in your inherent worth, and let you heart soar. In acupuncture my practitioner reminded me, our wings grow from the backside, when the heart is unburden, our wings sprout.

Tonight, under this full moon, let them unfurl like new leaves. Set yourself free.

I have pages, tear splattered pages, of free flowing words. Scribbled in anger and pain, confusion and sadness. After twenty twenty, I’m tired of carrying this weight yet conflict has edged me closer to my own truth. Tired of the way proximity to Black women gets used as shelter, tired of the reflex to reshare their words as though reposting were repair, as though citation alone were transformation.

I’m tired of the performance of anti-racism that still asks Black women to carry the weight, to name the harm, to carve the language, and to do a unfair amount labor while folks gesture toward their badges of justice and lawn signs from afar. Proximity is not accountability. Reposting is not reckoning and in this current climate, I refuse the comfort of calling it enough anymore. How do you show up? Actions scream louder than words, even when mouths are shut.

There is so much more swirling around my head and my heart, they pound. It has felt unsafe to share but the moon is pulling stories to the surface of my being to be freed.

I no longer need to waste my breathe and energy but I do need to give my stories to the light of day.

Full Moon Tea Blend | Clear Voice Clear Mind

Designed to ease head tension, soothe the throat and voice (Gemini rules communication, and support clarity, release, and mental calm

Gemini energy can become overactive, stuck in the mind or in the throat. These herbs soothe the throat, comfort the nervous system, and open channels of communication. Lemon balm + peppermint are a classic blend for tension-related headaches. Marshmallow supports the voice both physically and metaphorically, letting words slide out and a softening space for what needs to be expressed. Lavender helps you drop from scattered thought into stillness, perfect for a full moon release ritual. With each cup create spaciousness for letting go

INGREDIENTS (per cup)

+ 1 tsp of dried Lemon balm | calming for the nervous system, relieves tension, clears mental chatter

+ 1 tsp dried Peppermint | cooling for headaches, clears the head + sinuses

+ 1 tsp dried Marshmallow root | demulcent, soothing for the throat, encourages gentle emotional softening

+ ½–1 tsp dried Lavender | relaxes the mind + helps unwind overstimulation

+ Optional: pinch of fresh or dried Ginger | warming and supportive of circulation, if you tend to run cold in the winter months.

TO MAKE

Bring 1½ cups of water to a simmer. Add the marshmallow root (if using root form), simmer 5–10 minutes. Remove from heat, add the remaining herbs. Steep 10 minutes covered. Strain and sweeten gently with honey and a little steamed oat milk, if desired.

FULL MOON RITUAL

With each sip, inhale the aroma of the herbs, take them in. Exhale to release.

Inhale through the nose for four counts. Exhale through the mouth with a whisper-like “haaa”, opening the throat gently. With each exhale, imagine releasing of thoughts crowding the mind and hearth through the mouth, giving them over to the moon.

MANTRA: I release the words, the storylines, I no longer need, and I welcome clarity into my voice, into my mind, and into my heart.

In deep gratitude for your time & presence with my words, Alyson xx.

How do we let old dreams die?

This is a question I have been holding lately as this year has felt like tidal waves of change and transitions.

As we teeter on the precipice of a collapse, it feels like watching a bad movie or a nightmare, one we didn’t choose and one we can’t quite awake from. Where every day the news grows more dystopian, and slowly we’re realizing that the dreams we once held simply don’t fit in this reality; like a round peg in a dumpster-fire-shaped hole. Letting go of the ideas the heart has held is its own form of grief. The illusions we once clung to about how this world works, and what we might live into or experience, are falling away.

In this chasm, if we are brave enough to make our way toward it, there is as all-consuming darkness that shelters an unexpected opportunity: to listen more closely for the guidance of the heart, to meet a presence where we can attune and learn, more wildly, how to greet each moment as it arrives.

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The 9 of wands card keeps coming into my consciousness. We are tired, exhausted, scraped so thin but we are closer than we realize. We continue to take steps in the darkness on our meandering paths because despite it all, we are alive.

It is earth-shattering to understand that it’s time for our dreams, and maybe our very selves, to take new shapes. We may not be able to follow the footsteps of our parents or grandparents. Here in the west, especially in the United States, the certainties of ideas, goals, dreams we grew up with seem to be crumbling like sand through a clenched fist.

I am standing in my shop on a blustery late November day. Life feels so remarkably different than it did this time last year, if I’m honest, even two months ago. A gust of cold blew through the door as a friend, the owner of a local deli, hand-delivered my lunch. Snowflakes drift outside the shop window as a plow moseys down main street. couples huddle arm-in-arm as they walk the road, small lanterns of warmth against the cold.

Life looks entirely different than it did last year. I’m still trying to settle into new rhythms, but I’m holding no expectations for what my days should look like. This, I think, is the work of our winter, this season of transforming our hearts.

LIKE SNOW

Suppose we did our work
Like the snow, quietly, quietly,
Leaving nothing out.

—Wendell Berry

So much of my own work has been under the surface the last nine months. A thorough turning and twisting, a wringing-out, like washing clothes by hand until the knuckles ache.

Community has become central to my living these days. Opening myself to the care and connection of others has required a new level of vulnerability and communication. To receive care means letting people in, to our desires, our needs, and our deficits. These tender places can be hard to even admit to ourselves. But unlike the scarcity peddled by capitalism, community has shown me where true abundance lives.

Over the last few months, I’ve literally opened my doors, sharing space with others. A place we have come together to save seeds, breathe deeply, learn new skills, and create a place where honesty and complexity are not only allowed but welcomed. I had few expectations for this new adventure of opening my shop, Hawthorn, and yet in its becoming, it has evolved into the third space I needed while serving this community and filling an analog niche.

And so, friend, how do we embrace the unraveling? How do we let old dreams die so new, embodied living can take shape?

Perhaps it begins with a continual shedding that unlocks access to joy. With a turning toward the places we’d rather avoid and with embracing, gently and persistently, to confront our muddled mess within.

With you in this wintering,
Alyson

We are being asked now, by time, by circumstance, by the mysterious unfolding of it all, for a kind of courage that is not performative or theatrical, but unwavering. A courage that invites us to stay with what is in front of us, to hold it gently, and to alchemize it into something meaningful. It could look different for some, but I think it is the same for many. To stand firmly in the belief that life, for all is worth more… Whatever the something that might be you, will one day serve as medicine, for ourselves and for those we love.

Recently, a friend sent me photos of her harvests “the good work" as she named it, pole beans curling tenderly around the trellis, sturdy broccoli heads in woven baskets filled to the brim. When I saw them, my heart was so glad for her and yet a soft ache rose alongside it in my chest. After so many years of growing gardens, tending flowers, and preserving high summer's gifts, my own baskets are empty this season. I had grown no tomatoes to peel, there are no bouquets to cut, no herbs to string and hang upside down in the pantry. I have nothing to put up, no harvest of my own to preserve.

But as I sat with that subterranean feeling, something else began to bloom into my awarness. Maybe this year’s harvests simply look different. Instead of vegetables, herbs, and blooms, I had gathered memories across our travels. I have collected photographs, moments, feelings, the conversations lingering in my heart. My hands, while not soil-stained this summer, had still been full, nourished. I had been growing in other directions, working through hard things in my marriage, showing up more presently in my role as a mother, reconnecting with old friends, welcoming new ones, deepening bonds with cherished family, creating joy, sharing sadness, navigating the heavy burden of change, and making room for a future still in formation.

I realized I had been sorting through inner rooms rather than garden beds, reevaluating old narratives, letting go of inherited expectations, and practicing the subtle, often unseen labor of rearranging my life from the inside out. I was doing the slow, “good work” of allowing life to move through me differently to prepare space for whatever it is that comes next.

This is what these times seem to be asking of us to let go of what we thought we should be producing or proving, and instead to ask ourselves: What is the shape of life when it’s not being micromanaged and controlled, but trusted?

With the sun in Virgo, we’re in the midst of eclipse season now, those potent cosmic portals an invitation to reckon, release, and realign, but most importantly to stay open. Paired with the intensifying political atmosphere, the deepening climate grief, and the collective longing for a world that makes some modicum of sense again, it feels like something big is shifting beneath our feet and the surface of our consciousness. My dreams vivid and ripe with movement. So many of the systems and structures we once leaned on are crumbling, or revealing their deep fractures. And yet, amidst all of it, I still believe in the connective, powerful act of storytelling. I believe in bearing witness to our lives and listening deeply to the stories of others. These shared reflections of our interior landscapes, our tender thresholds, our seasons of change are not just personal. They are medicinal.

So I return to a question I’ve been sitting with: What do you radically desire that hasn’t yet been done? What lives inside you that is new, untried, untested but true? This is the moment to begin aligning with that truth to name it wholeheartedly and to follow it. To leave nothing of yourself behind on the table.

As Venus moves into Leo, the cosmos offers us a season to prepare our hearts with courage, strength, and a childlike wonder that remembers how to play even in times of uncertainty. This is an invitation to remain malleable, to soften even as we face transitions, grief, and the great unknowns that lie ahead.

The mornings are turning crisp now and the light is shifting ever so slightly. I’m learning in our new homespace. The light provides a golden edge to everything, and the once-vibrant colors of summer are just now beginning to fade. Alongside the beauty, there is a sense of urgency pressing in, as squirrels scurry with gathered mouthfuls across the yard. A reminder that time is a flowing river, currents are always shifting, nothing lasts forever, that there are very many things asking to be done.

And yet, there is wisdom in not rushing through our days. If slowness grants us clarity, then perhaps we are meant to hold urgency in one hand and deep intention in the other. This is where the energy of Virgo comes in not as perfectionism, but as devotion. As a inward practice of care, of discernment, and choosing what truly matters.

My invitation to you is to take the pause. Whatever reroute is currently being offered in your life: don’t push too hard. Try not to strive to manage what cannot be controlled. Instead, tend to what is yours to tend. From a place of safety and in deep inquiry, ask yourself what is it that you want to carry forward, and grieve and celebrate whatever it is you can finally set down.

There is a sacredness in the fallow seasons of life, in the empty baskets, and empty nests, and in the invitation to rest. We can locate our humanity in choosing to be present with what is, rather than chasing what could be or what was.

We are teetering on the edge of what comes next, and we do not need to have answers. How can we sit with an ever pervading sense of uncertainty? From what I hear, the only ask is that we bring our wholest selves to the threshold: willing, tender, and listening with our whole bodies.

And maybe that is enough.

I hope to share an update soon on our travels and other happenings, but for now, this is what bubbled up from my heart for you…

in gratitude and connection, Alyson xx.

This place is familiar. I found myself in before, last year, but in a much different way as I sorted through grief. The personal grief of losing my uncle and the collective grief of the state of this world, and now wading through these emotions in another way I never really expected.

It’s taken weeks to process enough, to let the dust settle enough for the first rays of clarity to appear. The words that sank like rocks in my gut have slowly began to get lighter and rise to the surface of my being.

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This is for the ones who feel sick with grief. For the ones whose nervous systems are stretched thin, who scroll until their stomach clenches, whose bodies and hearts carry the weight of what words fail to hold. This is not normal.

There are herbs to hold us. There is lineage, memory, and rooted support for this kind of reckoning. Herbs to center us in the maelstrom so we can let love lead.

HERBS TO HELP US GRIEVE, DIGEST, & REMAIN WHOLE

These are not cures. They are companions. Plant allies that remind us we are of the Earth, not the empire. Plants can bring us back into rhythm, aiding us in digesting what overwhelms and ground what feels chaotic.

Calendula (Calendula officinalis) | The Mover

Calendula is sun-warmed grief. Calendula doesn’t force healing; she coaxes it. Stirring what has gone still, moving stagnation, clearing the lymph, and helping emotions flow rather than fester.

Energetics: Warming, moving, bright. Calendula is sunlight in a flower form.

Biochemical properties: Lymphatic, anti-inflammatory, vulnerary. Calendula helps move what is stuck—physically in the body and metaphorically in the heart. It supports immune health and skin healing, and aids the liver in processing toxins (emotional and otherwise). Supports the body in detoxing emotional and physical toxins.
Spirit medicine: Calendula teaches us to listen, let go with grace. She shines light on the shadows, helping us grieve what’s dying without clinging to false hope.

Invitation | Use calendula as a tea, tincture, or rub calendula-infused oil over the heart or solar plexus with presence. Invite it to help you move what’s stuck, not to force healing, but to begin it.

Chamomile (Matricaria chamomilla) | The Softening

Chamomile is the grandmother who draws you in for a long exhale. She holds space without pushing, softens the edges of anxiety, and calms the heat of overwhelm. Chamomile is the one who gently whispers, "It's okay to rest." For the sleepless, the spun out, the ones who’ve been holding tension in the belly for too long.

Energetics: Cooling, relaxing, nurturing

Spirit medicine: Soothes anger that masks grief. Softens resistance to rest. Brings the nervous system back from the edge. Chamomile brings back an experience of softness when the world is harsh. It helps us meet fear with tenderness and hold complexity without rigidity.

Biochemical properties Anti-inflammatory, carminative, nervine. Chamomile supports digestion (especially when it’s impacted by stress), relaxes the gut-brain axis, and helps with sleep and nervous tension. Inducing relaxation, especially in stress-induced digestion issues.

Invitation | Drink as a strong infusion at the end of a heavy day. Add a touch of honey if you need sweetness to return. Sip slowly. Let it settle in the gut before trying to "understand" anything. Let your nervous system lead the way.

Lemon Balm (Melissa officinalis) | The Comforter

Lemon balm wraps around the heart like a balm for invisible wounds. For soothing heartbreak and anxiety, especially the kind that comes from seeing too clearly, feeling too much. Holding space for rays of joy to shine through you.

Energetics: cool, light, calming

Spirit medicine: Gathers scattered energy back into the body. Invites light in without bypassing the dark. Brings joy back to grief-heavy hearts.

Biochemical properties: Nervine, antiviral, cognitive support. Eases anxiety, supports the nervous system and emotional digestion.

Invitation | Steep fresh or dried lemon balm and drink with intention: like sunlight returning to a broken place. 

Dandelion Root (Taraxacum officinale) | The Digester

for supporting liver detox and emotional digestion. Dandelion root is tough love, the kind that brings clarity. She helps you break down the bitterness. She supports deep processing when you're overloaded by truth and seeking a way through.

Energetics: drying, slightly bitter, cooling

Spirit medicine: Teaches discernment. Helps you face reality without collapse. Anchors you in personal sovereignty.

Biochemical properties: Bitter tonic, liver support, diuretic. Enhances digestion, helps metabolize fats, clears the liver; emotionally and physically.

Invitation | Roast the root for a grounding tea or tincture. Ask what bitterness you’re holding. Let her help you let go.

Tulsi (Ocimum tenuiflorum (Holy Basil) ) The Sacred Witness

Tulsi (holy basil): for spiritual resilience and clarity of mind. A sacred plant of resilience. A grounding force to stand with you when you don’t know what to do. When you're oscillating between despair and determination, Tulsi is the still point in the storm.

Energetics: warming, uplifting, slightly drying

Spirit medicine: Connects you to the divine within. Strengthens your capacity to witness pain without becoming it. A plant for sacred activism.

Biochemical properties: Adaptogen, anti-inflammatory, antioxidant. Supports the stress response, cognitive clarity, and emotional equilibrium.

Invitation | Sip slowly, especially in ritual. Burn a few leaves as incense. Let her bring you back to what is holy.

A NOTE ON COLLAPSE

The political system as we know it isn’t broken, it’s doing what it was designed to do. But as it crumbles, we are left to hold the consequences. Grief is a sane response. Rage is a sacred one.

This isn’t about numbing ourselves to the pain of the world. It’s about resourcing ourselves so we can face it without losing our center. Herbs cannot solve systemic problems, but can help us face them with clarity. We connect with the plants not to forget, but to remember who we are, whole, interwoven, and capable of transmuting grief into action.

Death comes before rebirth, precedes awakening…

A RITUAL FOR DIGESTING

Choose the herb your body draws toward.

Prepare a tea, infusion, or tincture mindfully. There is no need to rush, set down the urgency.

Place one hand on your belly, one on your heart.

Ask:

What truths am I trying to swallow alone?

What truths am I avoiding because it’s too heavy?

What does my body need in this moment?

Sip. Breathe. Allow.

This is a long unfolding. We are not meant to process it all at once. But we can stay rooted as the world changes, tending our grief, strengthening our digestion, and remembering we are not machines for output or comprehension. We are soft animals with deep instincts and ancient supports.

Let the plants help you return to yourself. 

Again and again.

For those seeking deeper connection and context for this grief, my book Our Kindred Home is a companion for the long remembering. a love letter to the earth, a reckoning with collective loss, and a guide for re-rooting in relationship, ritual, and resilience.

If this herbal offering speaks to you, Our Kindred Home holds more: grief as sacred, home as resistance, and healing as something we do together. You can find it wherever books are sold or visit alysonmorgan.com.

*I’d love to know what plants, words, community you are turning to, to sit with the discomfort of these times?

In gratitude and connection, Alyson

To walk through this eclipse is to step into a terrain where longing and fear dance, where the path forward demands that we confront what we’ve kept hidden, from ourselves and others. The Fool lives here, at this crossroads. But The Fool is not foolish. She is the embodiment of radical trust, an ancestral knowing that life unfolds in spirals, not straight lines. She carries with her the wisdom of those who leapt before her, who risked everything to move toward liberation, toward a future they would never see. This is not the empty courage of the individual but the collective leap, the kind that roots itself in the wisdom of the land, of ancestors, of the unseen.

She moves with an ancient knowing, aware that rebirth requires a reckoning with the shadow. She leaps not out of ignorance, but because she trusts that what lies beneath the surface, what we are afraid to name, holds the keys to our liberation. 

Aries, initiatory energy, like the Fool, reminds us that desire is holy. Not the hollow craving of consumption, but the embodied longing that pulses through generations, calling us toward lives that honor not just our own flourishing, but the flourishing of all beings. To follow that desire is to be willing to stand at the precipice and leap to risk becoming undone in order to be reborn.

Eclipses often brings what is hidden into the light, collapsing the distance between what we desire and what we fear. Yet we do not have to hide.

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The next morning, I noticed the neon bud scales of maple trees begun to unfurl like tiny lanterns, as red-winged blackbirds, their crimson marks flashing, sing as they cling to last season’s prairie grass. I thought to myself, the Snowdrops must be up. My dear and delicate sentinels of the thaw, close their petals up tightly against the chill and dance open when the sun is warm and persistent. This time of the year exactly.

My yearly pilgrimage to the snowdrop community began in March twenty-twenty when I happened upon the sanctuary where they dwell, nestled gently in the woodlands. I didn’t know it then, but this place would be a solace and a magic I’d return to again and again. We even ended up renting the home that borders the very woodlands three years later. Synchronicities. These delicate blooms are a symbols of hope and renewal, they break winter’s grip with their resilience, petals bowed in reverence, yet steadfast in their emergence through the thawing earth. They are the first to illuminate the threshold between seasons, reminding me that even the smallest beings know when it is time to rise.

In their fleeting bloom, I have found over the years a bright assurance that life, with its chaos, twists, and turns, returns, again and again. Their presence whispers of the cycles that move beyond urgency: of patience, grace, and the promise new beginnings hold. I kneel among them, under the caw of the crow, breathing in their gentle ephemeral wisdom. However brief, these sacred moments in their presence changes me each year, and takes root in my heart, a courage to bloom tall carrying me through the seasons that follow.

As the Spring Equinox approaches and the sun enters Aries, a fragile balance hums between light and shadow. The Earth and I seem to be holding our breath, sensing the tension of what is yet to come. The days lengthen, the air thickens with warmth, and the ground stirs from its slumber. Yet beneath this gentle waking, there is a tremor, a subtle quiver, a pulse beneath the surface. Something is shifting, breaking, and shaking loose in the world around us, as if the Earth itself is exhaling after a long, hard season. We stand at the threshold of uncertainty, hearts poised like seeds pressing against the soil, unsure of what will emerge from the cracks in the land and within ourselves. But this unknowing is the very heartbeat of renewal. What is breaking open now is what will become new again, if we can muster the courage…

Now is the time to plant seeds, not only in the Earth but in our spirits, in the land, and in the hearts of our communities. The seeds we choose to sow carry far more than the promise of food or flowers; they hold within them the power of transformation, resilience, and hope. Through the lens of Indigenous wisdom, seeds are the ancestors’ gift, tiny vessels of memory and possibility, a thread woven across time that binds us to the Earth, the sky, and to one another. We need each other. Each seed, a whisper from the past, reminding us that renewal is not only possible but inevitable. And so, we press them gently into the soil, trusting that what takes root will one day bloom, filling the cracks with life once more.

In the cycles of planting and harvesting, we are reminded of the sacred relationship we share with the land. Seeds are not mere objects; they are living, full of story, of memory, and of possibility. When we hold a seed in our hand, we are holding the future, the promise of life to come, of growth against the odds, of resilience in the face of change. In the teachings of many Indigenous cultures, seeds are treated with reverence, for they are seen as the carriers of wisdom passed down from generation to generation. They are the living breath of the Earth itself, a reflection of the interconnectedness of all beings.

But as we begin to sow, we are reminded that the world is breaking and shaking, and we don't yet know what will emerge. What will grow from the seeds we plant? What new forms of life, new ways of being, will rise from the soil? Can we summon the courage of our roots to continue on? This is the inherent beauty and the complete mystery of the present moment. In the spirit of the equinox, we are called to cultivate trust, not in certainty, but in our ability, in community, and the process. We do not know exactly what the future will hold, but we can find peace in the knowing that the earth, in all its wisdom, will guide us toward new beginnings.

Seeds are the very foundation of life, carrying within them the genetic diversity that sustains ecosystems, cultures, and communities. Yet, in today's world, seeds are under attack. They are being privatized, patented, and genetically modified by corporations that seek to control the food supply and profit from nature’s most sacred gift. As industrial agriculture spreads, the traditional, open-pollinated seeds, those that have been saved, exchanged, and cultivated by Indigenous and local communities for generations are disappearing. The diversity of crops that once thrived in harmony with the land is being replaced by monocultures that are vulnerable to pests, diseases, and climate change.

Last fall, as AJ and I drove along a stretch of rural country road, we noticed a car pulled over, hazard lights blinking in staccato against the dusk. An older gentleman sat behind the wheel, but it was the woman outside who caught my eye. A wise, silver-haired elder with a glimmer of knowing in her gaze. She stood at the edge of the prairie, gathering seeds from wildflowers and slipping them into her purse, as if tucking away treasure: fragments of the future. In that moment, I held my aspiration and inspiration: this is how we do it. A quiet, profound act of defiance reminding us that in the tiniest seed lies the potential for revolution, for sovereignty, for renewal. Saving seeds is an act of resistance, a powerful reclamation of life in a world that seeks to commodify it. To save and plant seeds is to honor the wisdom of our ancestors, to safeguard the resilience of ecosystems trembling under the weight of a shifting weather, and to defend the sacred right to cultivate food in harmony with the earth.

This Spring Equinox is a time to honor the teachings of the land, to listen deeply, and to approach the act of planting with reverence. Plant the kernels of wisdom you’ve gleaned, however small and unassuming, yet brimming with the knowing of what they are meant to become. Like seeds tucked gently into the soil, our truths carry within them the shape of possibility, the blueprint of what is yet to unfold. We scatter them softly, trusting the unseen work beneath the surface, where roots tangle with memory and dreams stretch upward toward the light. Can we trust that we, too, might know the way? That within us, there is an ancient remembering, a deep knowing of how to break open, how to root, how to rise? In community like the snowdrops? Our courage feeding off of each other’s resonance?

This is in itself is a ritual, an encouragement to trust what your heart knows in these times…

The shaking and breaking we feel in the world around us are not harbingers of destruction, but the birth pangs of creation in motion. Just as a seed must crack open to give rise to new life, so too are we being split wide; hearts, minds, and spirits, readying ourselves to emerge anew. The soil, rich and expectant, is ready to receive us. As we prepare to sow, how can we listen more fully to what it whispers? How can we plant not only with our hands, but with intention, love, and the understanding that we are not separate from our Earth? How can we hold in our hearts the ancient wisdom that tells us: what we plant today will feed tomorrow?

Let us plant with reverence. Let us scatter seeds with the knowledge that each one carries not just the promise of life, but a story, an echo of our ancestors, a prayer for the future. And as we press them into the soil, may we remember that we, too, are seeds. Held in the dark, waiting to emerge, ready to root ourselves in a world being made new. May we walk gently upon this land, remembering the sacredness of every seed, every sprout, and every bloom.

In this moment of shaking and breaking, may we trust that something beautiful is emerging. Even if we cannot yet see, there is a something that will rise in its own time, just as the seed becomes the plant, and the plant becomes the harvest.

Let us plant in co-creation.

Spring Equinox Blessings, Alyson.

Under the blood moon glow of this Virgo Full Moon Eclipse, on March 13 to 14th, shifts lie in wait. An exhale long overdue, a clearing, a shedding. We are not asked to act but to allow. Virgo, meticulous, exacting, and discerning (sometimes to a fault), meets Pisces, vast and unbound (requiring grounding). One seeks order; the other dissolves it. Together, their balance remind us: renewal begins with release.

Virgo finds the magic in the mundane. This archetype knows that meaning is found through the making. This Virgo Full Moon invites you to clear space, to allow what is to come. This eclipse asks us to cleanse not just our home spaces but our spirits, our bodies, the unseen stagnancies, the patterns, the beliefs we carry that block what wants to root and bloom within you.

Virgo rules the gut, the daily rituals, the meticulous tending, and the processing of information. Virgo is that gut feeling. How can we support ourselves in processing all that is being thrown at us? The sun is in Pisces, the liminal, the waters that remember, a reminder to rest, fully. Virgo helps us make the space and reorganize so we can rest more fully and allow our dreams to take root.

What tools do you already have to support this transformation? First we clear.

The bridge between them? The lymphatic system, the body’s quiet tide of purification.

As we step into Spring, we are called to move, to flow, to wring out winter’s remnants.

Alexis of writes about Virgo, it is a “sign does have a tendency towards melancholy and retention of emotions, so making sure that they are practicing regular release-oriented activities in their life” Enter the herbal allies: cleavers, violet, chickweed the gentle movers of lymph, inviting easeful detox, and ensuing clarity.

TEND & PURIFY YOUR VESSEL

Virgo is ruled by the planet, Mercury, and governs the body’s systems of purification: digestion, assimilation, elimination. It is the steward of order, tending to the devil in the details, refining what is taken in and what is released. Physically, Virgo is tied to the gut, liver, and lymphatic system, those quiet laborers of cleansing and discernment. Spiritually, Virgo teaches us the magic is in the tending, it recognizes that care is a practice, that devotion is found in the small, repeated acts of nourishment.

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What is Human Nature?

Human Nature is both a reckoning and a remembering in a collapsing society. A gentle exploration of what it means to be human; in right relationship with the lush and expansive more-than-human world. It is a call to return to the rhythms of the Earth, to move from wading in the shallow end to dive into the deep.

Beyond the artificial constraints of extraction and individualism, and to root into something deeper, ancestral, cyclical, and interdependent. Here, we embrace the contradictions of modern existence, process the cognitive dissonance while seeking wisdom in the unseen, the forgotten, and the enduring as guidance from the living world.

Each month, Folk Almanac serves as a guide to Earth and Season, weaving together spiritual ecology, nature observations for a changing world, plant wisdom, and folk practices that tether us to the land and one another. Moon Missives map the celestial movements, offering reflections on the cosmos as both mirror and guide.

I write as a companion on this path, on caretaking self, earth, family, and community through divesting from extractive systems, through tending to the unseen, through decolonizing our homes, hearts, and minds. As a mother, a feminist, and a believer in the wisdom of collective living, I offer prose, poetry, and art to soften the edges of isolation, blend the practical and the spiritual to remind us that we do not walk alone.

Holding Both

I have always loved beauty: the way light catches the curve of a ceramic bowl, the soft weight of linen against my skin, the wild disorder of a blooming meadow. To my Venus ruled soul, beauty is a source of comfort, joy, and self-expression. And yet, I hold in the same breath an acute awareness of the ways beauty is commodified, the way capitalism twists our longing for beauty into a hunger for more, the cost hidden in the hands that make, extract, and discard.

It is an uneasy tension to love aesthetics while resisting the systems that exploit them. I have wrestled with the guilt of finding pleasure in the luxurious, knowing the weight of labor and waste they often carry. But I have also learned that resistance does not mean deprivation. There is beauty in sustainability, in making things last, in cherishing what is already here. There is beauty in the handmade, the mended, the passed down. And there is power in choosing beauty that does not exploit but instead nurtures, restores, and sustains.

As a Black woman, this tension is layered with even more complexity. The act of embracing beauty, of adorning, of creating, of claiming space has often been policed, diminished, or commodified in ways that strip it of its power. But I am learning that resistance does not have to look like sacrifice. It can be found in the very spaces we love, if we choose to reimagine them.

Taking Up Space

I have spent much of my life making myself small. Whether in predominantly white spaces, in conversations where my voice felt unheard, or in moments when I feared my experience makes others uncomfortable and my very existence makes me a target. This shrinking, this learned silence, is a burden so many of us carry; a survival mechanism, a way to navigate a world that often demands our invisibility.

But each day I grow, I learn to take up space. To speak my truth, to create without apology, to claim my existence fully. It is not always easy. The fear of rejection, of fragility, of backlash, lingers. But to take up space is to insist on our right to exist wholly; our voices, our art, our presence, all of it.

This is not just about me. It is about all who have been misled to believe we are too much or not enough for this game. It is about stepping outside, reclaiming what was taken, about making fertile ground for those who come after us.  Our living and being is not a privilege; it is our birthright. And I am running towards it, not away from it.

An Invitation

These are the threads that I hope to weave throughout my work on Human Nature, the beauty and the resistance, the complexity and the tenderness, the refusal to shrink and the longing to create. Let’s gather, unravel, and rebuild, together.

A Note On The Importance of Paid Subscription 

If you’ve been here a while and followed across my platform you know the support of paid subscribers helps keep the lights on, it sustains my family, and gives me the space and room to continue creating. If my words have ever been a balm, or my photographs have resonated with you, know that for the price of a cup of coffee you can make a meaningful contribution to the work I do and share. As a Black woman, I’ve often struggled to truly value myself in this system. I’ve given my time and labor in many ways, often asked to create for free. Asking for support from this community and readership is my act of reclamation. It is my way of honoring the work I love to do and the value I bring to the world.

How do you manage your media and phone use?

An opening for us to share our thoughts and feelings about screen time as a group, to set shared goals while respecting each other’s needs. Innocent enough, yet it landed in our minds like an interrogation, because I think we all wish we were doing better... A quiet wave of guilt crept in. The room went still. Parents exchanged uneasy glances, some fiddling with their fingers, others staring at the floor. No one had prepared for this question.

More often than not, we are plugged in, our attention splintered, pulled in a thousand directions. An invisible force shapes our days, unnoticed, yet ever-present.

One parent finally spoke: “It’s all about attention, isn’t it?”

I nodded in agreement. Yes. It’s all about attention and intention.

In a world where time, focus, and energy have become commodities for sale, attention is the currency we don’t even realize we’re spending. We are so immersed in this system that we rarely pause to question its toll.

I exchanged a glance with a friend across the room. We didn’t need words to know what the other was thinking:

How do we talk about this without sounding like hypocrites?

Maybe we are. How can we hold both? Does it have to be all or nothing?

We attempt to teach our children presence, connection, and slowness, yet we, too, are tethered to the pull. How do we ask them to resist what we ourselves struggle to escape?

Later that night, my partner and I spoke in hushed tones.“Does it help to tell them what we’re using our phones for?” I asked, thinking of the way our children’s eyes linger on our screens, their curiosity blooming into suspicion. We have to be more honest with ourselves…

They are learning the language of phones and screens, sensing that something important unfolds there something that keeps us from turning toward them. They don’t just see distraction. They see absence. And they understand, perhaps better than we do, that attention, our attention is something they have to vie for.

I remember a time before this.

Back in the day, if you wanted to talk to a friend, you had to sit together in the same space or I’d pick up the phone to call, wait for the ring. Voicemail. We were not always so available to each other. No text messages, no social media updates, more visceral connection. 

And waiting for a show to come on TV? That was a lesson in patience. We had to wait an entire week for our favorite episodes, no fast-forwarding through commercials, no binging entire season in one sitting. There was something sacred in that waiting. It wasn’t just about entertainment, it was about presence, the art of being in the moment with a focused joy and discomfort.

But our children are growing up in a world that does not wait. A world where so much is immediate, where screens hold the answers before the questions are even fully formed. Worlds upon worlds at our fingertips. They are growing up in an economy of distraction.

And we, parents, adults, are caught between the worlds: the one, like what we were raised in, where attention was given freely, and the one they are inheriting, where attention is siphoned away.

It is easy to believe we must justify our own use of screens, as though explaining makes the reality more palatable. But perhaps the real issue is not how much time we spend on our devices, but rather how little control we have over where our attention goes.

That moment in the classroom was not just about screen time. It was about the slow erosion of focus, the way our modern lives are structured to capture every moment and commodify our gaze.

So we must ask:

How do we reclaim our attention? How do we teach our children that the world is not just a series of notifications, but a place to be fully present in?

Sharing some suggestions at the end of this piece.

For our family, our school provides a kind of container: no screens on school nights, a structure that prioritizes creativity, mindfulness, and deep engagement with the present. It offers a reminder that attention is something to be cultivated, not surrendered.

But this isn’t about rejecting technology altogether. It is about developing the discernment to decide when we are truly present and when we are merely consuming time. It is about turning away from the screen long enough to meet our children’s eyes, to listen wholeheartedly, to dwell in the discomfort and beauty of undistracted presence.

Because they are already noticing.

Our children see how often our faces are lit by the glow of our devices. Our children feel the tug of our divided attention. And if we do not teach them the language of presence, they will grow up believing that fractured, distracted living is normal.

But this way of being is not normal. It is has become commonplace.

And as parents, we have the power and responsibility to restore balance. To teach our children that attention is sacred, that it is a gift, not a resource to be mined and sold.

The pull of our phones is not just about habit. It is about escape.

Phones offer a portal, an easy step away from discomfort, a place where the illusion of control feels possible in a chaotic world. They can provide instant relief from boredom, stress, and uncertainty. But the relief is fleeting, and when the screen dims, we are left with the same restless hunger. Boredom is fertile ground.

If we are not careful, the phone becomes both the escape and the trap. How can we be flexible, recognizing phones as a tool? Allowing ourselves to enjoy technology as part of a well rounded existence but not the center of it.

So we must root ourselves in something deeper; in an economy of presence. In the practice of choosing where our attention lands. How can we encourage healthy habits and lead without judgment? Demonstrating there are positive and healthy ways to use screens, media with balance.

This external, built world will always be louder. But the internal world, lush with stillness, creativity, deep thought is where true abundance lies. If we can teach our children to value that generative space, to resist the commodification of their focus, then perhaps they can build a future where attention is not something to be spent, but a thing to be nurtured and honored.

And perhaps, in doing so, we can remember that sovereignty for ourselves, too.

Create Family Rituals

By setting boundaries around screen time and emphasizing intentional activities, families can reconnect with each other and reduce the influence of screens in their daily lives.

+ Pick one night a week to disconnect from all screens and do something together, like playing a board game or having a themed dinner.

+ Instead of screen time before bed, create rituals for reading, talking about your days, or reading a bedtime story, together.

+ Designate certain parts of the home as “screen free” where everyone is encouraged to engage in face-to-face interaction, like the dining table, living room and bedrooms.

+ Establish a daily or weekly limit for recreational screen time for both parents and kids.

+ No screens during meals or family time.

+ Instead of screen time, spend time outside or do active hobbies together, like hiking, biking, or even going on walks.

+ Choose board games and puzzles that involve cooperation and communication.

+ Creative play like drawing, painting, crafting, or building things together.

+ Involve your kids in meal preparation, cooking dinner or baking together. It’s a great way to spend quality time, teach life skills, and bond.

+ Reading time, either together or individually. Share stories and discuss your favorite parts.

+ Engage in community events, like visiting the library, farmers market, and music and more.

I’d love to hear your thoughts about screen time, parenting and the pull of the digital world as I’m sitting on my computer, staring at a screen, writing to you. Life is a trip and makes very little sense…

In connection, Alyson.

Each edition is an invitation to slow down, resist the relentless pace of capitalism, and rediscover a sense of reciprocity with the land, the seasons, and the more-than-human world. Here we celebrate the quiet beauty of small, intentional acts that sustain our souls, soils, and the seeds of future we dream of blooming.

NATURE OBSERVATIONS IN A CHANGING WORLD

One day last week after school, my almost nine year old asked if I could take him on a hike. I had a long day, but he mentioned wanting to visit the Pines. I held a similar longing earlier in the day, and saw this as a sign to step outside of our well worn routines. The air is still holding winter’s bite but softened by the promise of early thaw. Along the river we stood in the silt and muck, watching as vast sheets of ice drifted sluggishly, colliding with deep, echoing cracks before continuing their slow procession downstream. The land was hushed, still caught between seasons.

quickening | verb: 1. make or become faster or quicker.

At 4:35 p.m. on February 27th, standing in the open prairie and inspecting a beaver chew, we heard the call. He recognized it instantly, the unmistakable, rolling cries of Sandhill Cranes. Echoing across the nearly empty reserve, reverberating in the crisp air as we stood still, observing. A breeding pair, returning home weeks ahead of their usual mid-March arrival, circled before descending into the marsh just south of us, vanishing into the reeds. This phenological shift in their migration may suggest an earlier arrival due to warmer temperatures. A sigil of changing patterns.

On the drive home, we spotted four Tundra Swans huddled in a shallow drainage puddle in an agricultural field, a brief and unexpected resting place. The larger lakes and ponds remained locked in an exchange of thaw and freeze with our erratic weather patterns, but on this day, they were ice. Yet this puddle had formed from an overnight rain-that-should-have-been-snow, a sign of the season’s unsteady transition. As we neared home, the first rabbit of the season was spotted bolting across the gravel drive. There is grief in these changes, in erratic patterns, a wave of loss and confusion washes over us both.

The Spring Equinox, March 20th, is a portal to spring, the balance between light and dark. A time for planting seeds, both literally in the garden and metaphorically in your life. Honor the balance between intuition and action as thresh seeds from gardens past and plant seeds of possibility. Every seed you sow carries the potential for transformation, not only for yourself, but for the land and your community.

Stay tuned for a special post with a Spring Equinox Ritual closer to March 20th.

ONCE UPON A MARCH

March has always begged me to have trust in the process…

In California, in 2013, just days after the equinox, AJ and I were married beneath a Magnolia tree that had already shed its blooms. Perfumed Wisteria cascaded around us, and our dear friend, Aaron, played the guitar as my father walked me down the pathway. Bumblebees in euphoria, buried themselves in the golden blossoms of Forsythia while we celebrated our union in the company of 30 of our closest family and friends. The swell of Spring and love danced in the air.

A few short months later, we packed up our entire lives and left California, saying goodbye to everything I knew, the familiar landscapes and warmth of home for a new chapter in the Midwest. Every anniversary since, March 24th, has looked entirely different. To be honest, I had no real idea what I was stepping into.

quickening | verb: 2. reach a stage in pregnancy when movements of the fetus can be felt.

Our first anniversary, I cried: partly because of the hormones growing our daughter inside me, partly because I was experiencing my first real winter, a polar vortex bringing snow on the day that looked wholly different than the day we wed.

Since our wedding day, March has felt pregnant with both endings and beginnings, a threshold between seasons and selves.

On a March 4th, under the cover of darkness in warm waters, I birthed our son into the world at our home in Milwaukee.

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Today, February 28th, a grassroots organization is encouraging an economic boycott scheduled to run 12 am EST to 11:59 pm EST the goal is no purchases in store or online from major companies akin to the Target, Amazon, Walmart, encouraging no credit or debit purchases like gas, using cash if necessary and when possible. With another to follow on March 28th. Can that purchase in your cart wait? Maybe it’s time to cancel that subscription? Can we shift our relationship to certain retailers to support our values?

On this last day of Black History Month, I see this as is an inflection point. I’m not sure the economic impact this one day can have but I see the rise of collective action and the conversations around it as vital. The boycott is not new. It is an inheritance, a lineage of refusal. It is organization of Black women in Montgomery, feet blistered but unbowed, walking rather than financing their own oppression. It is the Delano grape strike, where farmworkers withheld their labor and asked consumers to withhold their dollars, to demand dignity in the fields. It is a mother turning away from a store that no longer honors the fullness of her humanity, choosing instead to press her money into the hands of those who do.

THE ECONOMIC POWER OF BOYCOTTS

Boycotts are not just symbolic acts; they create measurable financial impact. The Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955-56, sparked by the incident with Rosa Parks, but organized and led by the likes of Jo Ann Robinson and Ella Baker and sustained by thousands of Black residents, cost the city’s transit system nearly a million dollars in revenue and ultimately forced desegregation.

More recently, the economic power of organized consumer action has again made itself known. These economic shifts demonstrate that corporations respond when their bottom line is threatened, reinforcing the necessity of strategic economic resistance.

This is the moment to remember and reclaim that history. With the rollback of diversity, equity, and inclusion policies at the likes of well loved companies like Target, (yes, I removed the app from my phone and haven’t spent a dollar there) with corporations that once whispered a commitment to inclusion now slipping back into silence, we are reminded that justice cannot be left in the hands of the market. Corporations will pivot, bend, retract unless held to the flame. And that flame is us.

But it is not only about where we withhold, it is about where we give on a daily basis. Shifting our economic focus to the local community, small business and makers we want to support and pouring our attention into places where we can see a difference being made. It is about making the economic a site of liberation rather than extraction. It is about slipping our dollars into the threads woven with intention, into brands that do not merely pay lip service to sustainability but are rooted in stewardship.

When we are going to buy new, turn toward more quality over quantity and those things that support our values, fair and equitable pay, organic and natural fibers when we can, to refuse the toxic chemicals into our food, land, and pressed against our skin. To see our choices not only as aesthetic but as ecological, political, and deeply personal. Exercising more discernment around what we want from what we need and making what we spend count.

Finding, supporting and sharing the companies that are striving to make a difference within our deeply imperfect systems. When we refuse to fund the destruction of land, the poisoning of bodies, the erasure of voices, we reassert our own power.

REFLECTIONS ON OUR OWN ECONOMIC POWER

What does your spending say about the world you wish to create? I see this as boycott an opportunity to re-evaluate our relationship to consumption and investigate how we spend, where we spend, and our why?

• Have you ever paused before a purchase to ask whether the company aligns with your values?

• What are your values?

• Do you know where your clothing, food, or household goods come from and whose hands have made them?

• If you were to shift even a small percentage of your spending toward ethical, local, small, and sustainable businesses, what impact could that have over a year?

• What would it look like to embrace economic resistance, not just in times of crisis, but as an ongoing practice?

Nothing under capitalism is perfect, and no brand or purchase will be entirely free from harm but within this imperfect system, we can still use the avenues available to us to move toward justice, equity, and care. We can rethink how much we can give up to gain back bits of our sovereignty.

This is not just about shopping differently for one day, it is about living differently. It is about understanding that capitalism has always been extractive, but our participation in it need not be passive. It is about seeing our spending not as isolated transactions but as an ongoing conversation with our living and built worlds.

So we choose. We withhold. We redirect. Imperfectly. It can be unrealistic for people to completely withhold, especially in the silos of our individualistic systems but the progress made to create community in Buy Nothing movement is promising. Making changes on that scale in our day to day lives takes support, community, preparation and active participation often material conditions that are hard to come by under capitalism. The art of living is progress over perfection. Perfection is often a construct of control, a byproduct of systems that prioritize productivity over presence. But real, meaningful change happens in the small, imperfect steps we take every day.

To live is to experiment, adapt, and trust the unfolding, knowing that mistakes are part of the making. Whether it’s in creativity, community, or the way we care for the Earth, progress, not perfection, is where life truly happens. I know this process for me goes in waves. I vacillate between having a deep rooted consciousness to times where convenience wins out. That ebb and flow is so real, living with intention isn’t about rigid adherence, but about returning, again and again, to the heart of what matters most. There are seasons of deep-rooted consciousness, where every action feels aligned, and there are times when convenience, survival, or simply the demands of life take precedence. But that doesn’t mean we’ve failed; it means we’re human.

I think the key is in the returning. Trusting that awareness, like our hearts, is a muscle, that small choices accumulate, and that grace is just as essential as effort. Progress isn’t linear, and maybe it’s not meant to be. Instead of striving for constancy within failed systems, we can embrace the waves, leaning in when we can, forgiving ourselves when we can’t, and knowing that even in the drift, we are still moving forward.

And it not because we believe consumer choices alone will save us but because every action, every refusal, every dollar divested from harm and reinvested in care is a step toward a world where justice is not an afterthought, it is centered.

We do this in honor of the lineages of those who came before. We do this for those who will come after. We do this because to live in alignment with our values is to build, stitch by stitch, the world we dream of.

JUST FOR TODAY | Can the thing you need today be borrowed from a friend, shared within your community, or found in a way that honors resourcefulness over convenience? Can you check your local library before buying new, explore a thrift store, or repurpose something already in your home? Can you go outside for a hike instead of heading to the movies? Can you host a pantry potluck with friends instead of going out to dinner? Just for today. These small shifts in how we approach consumption are acts of resistance, reclaiming the lost art of reciprocity, reducing waste, and challenging the notion that fulfillment is tied to ownership. By choosing to borrow, trade, mend, or seek secondhand, we not only lighten our individual impact but also cultivate deeper connections with people, with place, and with the stories held in well-loved objects.

RECOMMENDED READING

Hooked! Buddhist Writings on Greed, Desire, and the Urge to Consume

I first read this collection of Buddhist writings eight years ago before we downsized our home and moved across the state. It examines the deep-rooted forces of greed, desire, and consumerism that shape our modern world and relationships to consumption. Drawing from ancient teachings and contemporary reflections, Hooked! explores how our cravings, whether for material goods, status, or fleeting pleasures, fuel cycles of dissatisfaction and suffering. Through mindful awareness and intentional living, the book offers insights on how to cultivate a more balanced, content, and ethical relationship with consumption. A must-read for anyone seeking to untangle the ties between personal well-being and our collective patterns of excess.

Mending Life: A Handbook for Repairing Clothes and Hearts by Nina & Sonya Montenegro

More than just a practical guide to repairing worn and torn fabrics, Mending Life is a beautiful meditation on slowness, reverence for nature, and sustainability. With detailed tutorials, thoughtful reflections, and stunning illustrations, Nina and Sonya Montenegro show how mending is an act of resistance against disposability culture, one that fosters deeper connection to our belongings, our communities, and the natural world. A guide for anyone looking to embrace a more intentional, hands-on relationship with the things they own, this book reminds us that repair is not just about fixing what’s broken, but about cultivating a life of resilience, creativity, and reverence.

Did you know about this economic boycott? Will you be participating? I’d love to know if you’ve begun a journey of renegotiating your spiritual and physical relationships to consumption? Feel free to share this with friends and community members as a conversation starter.

In gratitude and community, Alyson

Pisces season arrives like a dissolving edge, blurring the boundaries between self and world, waking and dreaming, effort and ease, we understand it all as one. As winter loosens its grip here in the Midwest, the maple sap begins to flow and the Earth begins to thaw, we, too, find ourselves in a state of motion: uncertain, shifting, sensing before knowing. In a time of political and social instability, when reality itself feels fluid and narratives twist like tides, Pisces, the 12th and final sign of the zodiac, calls us to look beyond surface distractions, our attention called to the deeper currents shaping our world.

With Neptune, Pisces’ ruling planet, deep in its home sign, illusions are thick in the air. Yet Saturn’s presence urges us toward discernment, asking: What is real? What is worth building? Along with Venus Retrograde on March 1st and a Virgo Full Moon Eclipse on March 13th will cast light on what needs grounding, pushing us to weave the mystical into the practical not as escapism, but as a means of reshaping our path with intention.

This Pisces New Moon, the last of the astrological year, arrives on February 27th as a threshold, a liminal space between what has been and what is yet to come. This lunation is the opening siren call of eclipse season, a time of endings, reckonings, and reimaginings. In the face of uncertainty, this lunation reminds us that creativity is not just about art, but about survival, the quiet, daily acts of shaping a life, a future, a world where something new can take root.

“For roughly 40 days, the planet of love, unions, art, and aesthetics makes an underworld journey. During Venus’ subterranean descent, our relationship to beauty and pleasure comes up for review. It’s time to be discerning about the connections that amplify your courage and those that diminish your vitality. Instead of seeking approval from others, be bold about claiming your desires.” Chani Nicolas

OUR DEPTH OF FEELING TO GUIDE US

Our relationships, the ground of our being, and all we know is shifting. As we are in the process of an ending, how can we let go to hold on?

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