◐ eClips: River Runner
The moon is waxing, with light spreading across its surface in the lead-up to next week’s full moon. We’re on the cusp of the summer solstice in the Northern Hemisphere, so the days are long and, in many places, hot. I’m in Kansas, where temperatures have breached 100 over the past couple of days.
I happily forgot about all the pests I have to dodge when I spend time in the wild out here — the ticks, the mosquitoes, the mites. But I’m also encountering more welcome markers of home — I’ve been staining my hands purple picking mulberries and watching lightning bugs flash across the grass at twilight. Summer is here!
I’m traveling, and trying to rest and spend time with family, so I’ll keep this week’s note short and sweet. My spotlight interview with Hannah was such a treat, and her advice to me — to all of us — was to go get in some water!
So I’m about to take heed and hop in a kayak with Nathan and make my way down Elk River, which flows past the farmhouse where his parents live (and beyond). We’ll see if I can avoid picking up a million ticks along the way. I’ll leave you with some playlists I’ve made this year to correspond with each element: water, fire, earth, air, and ~aether~ … plus this short one for facilitating Zoom calls, because I’m repurposing it for dancing outdoors. These songs were not intended for bopping around inside those virtual Brady Bunch frames, right? Maybe one of these playlists will suit your mood. Tell me what you’re listening to, or which body of water you’ve been visiting!
Spotlight: Hannah Lasorsa
Hannah Lasorsa is a writer, herbalist, gardener, and photographer. She does marketing for herbal brands through Herbal Content Cottage. She lives with her husband, Jake, in Lawrence, Kansas. [Hannah and I were co-workers at Mother Earth News for several years. We once spent a magical weekend with friends in a lake house near Lawrence, all of us gleefully jumping into the water at all times of day, spinning old records, and playing cards indoors when a storm rolled in. The essence of Midwest summer!]
Happy birthday!
Thank you! It’s supposed to be like 102 degrees, so not sure how I’m feeling about that.
It’s freaking hot here. I’m near Wichita right now. It’s nasty, dude.
Yeah, it is not fun. I can only imagine that you’re kind of used to Pacific Northwest weather by now.
Do you consider this slice of the year spring, since it’s “spring” right now, or are you just fully in summer mode?
Oh, I’m totally in summer mode. And it’s probably also in part because of the weather. It’s just so hot here right now that it feels very much like swimming and iced tea. And even the herbs that you traditionally think of for high summer, like St. John’s wort, is having this amazing year here this year. I’m seeing it along all the sides of the roads, it’s so abundant, and I always really think of St. John’s wort as a summer herb. So yeah, I feel very much in summer.
Tell me a little more about the plants and celebrations and rituals that you associate with summer.
Well, my birthday is really close to the summer solstice, they’re like four days apart, so those always overlap for me a lot. I always feel like it’s this whole celebratory week. And then as far as rituals go, this week, Jake and I just made elderflower champagne for the first time. And I’ve always wanted to make it, I’ve always thought it sounded really good and looked really beautiful. Elderflower is just starting to bloom here, and the champagne needs to ferment for two weeks, so we realized that we can’t necessarily drink it on my birthday, but we can make a ritual where we always make it on my birthday weekend, and go foraging and get all the stuff and make it together. So I love that there’s this recurring plant and recipe that I can sync up with my birthday weekend! That makes me really, really happy. And it’s a plant I love.
How magical. Ugh, elder!
Ugh, I know!
My friend Morgan and I stumbled across this path — there’s this walking trail along the river a couple miles from us, and Morgan and I were walking there one time, and we noticed this area was super-overgrown with invasive vines, and it was completely choked out. Everything in this whole grove was basically going to die, because they were so, so, so covered and choked out. And we started looking under the vines, and we realized that it was a massive elder grove. Everything under the vines was elder. So we’ve gone back three or four times over the course of the last couple months, and we’ve worked our asses off pulling vines down off of all this elder and uncovering them.
So I went back last weekend to see how they were doing and if any of them had flowers on them. Because I wasn’t sure, for all I knew they were still really little — they were really not in good shape when we found them. And I walk into this grove, and there’s hundreds of elderflowers. Like, everywhere. And there’s all these cottonwood buds floating through the air, and birds chirping, and I just felt like I walked into heaven. I literally started crying, I was like, oh my god.
Yes, something about this is making me tear up, but I’m also smiling. The earth is like, I have this amazing gift for you, but you have to work hard to get it!
Yes! And it was just the best thing, because I love to go foraging, but I’ve never felt like I could give back in a really strong way. I’ll try to leave a little offering of some herbs or some hair and say thank you, but I’ve never really made a big impact out in the wild. So this was the first time, where I was harvesting from this grove and I was like, “Yeah, babies, remember me? What’s up!” I didn’t feel at all guilty about taking it, because I felt like I had really helped foster that. It was cool. It’s a good feeling.
Your life is intertwined with plants at every level … can you tell me a bit about how your relationship with plants has evolved over the years? Have you felt differences in how you relate to them and know them over time?
Yeah! When I first started studying plants, and herbs especially, I was really interested in all the kind of obscure ones. Ones that you don’t really hear about, that you’re not going to find at the grocery store. Like, motherwort and horehound and catnip. And I loved those, and I still do to this day, but this year especially, I’ve been really appreciating some of the more easy-to-find traditional herbs, and kind of, in a way, rediscovering them for myself.
So, chamomile is one, and chamomile is flourishing in my garden this year for the first time ever. I’ve never really been able to grow it, and this year, it’s the most beautiful patch. And I think it’s because we’ve had a lot of rain and cool weather. And I’m just falling in love with it all over again, and it’s one that’s so easy to take for granted. Like, OK, chamomile, I get it, you’re the most basic one. Same with peppermint! I just am so happy to have it, I keep dehydrating it, I put it in all of my teas. And it kind of took me awhile to realize that the herbs that are available at the grocery store and that have continued to have a relationship with humans over so many years, even as we become, generally, as a society, more and more disconnected from plants, it just shows that they’re that much more able to withstand the test of time. It doesn’t make them boring, it makes them amazing!
So, I’m moving from the obscure to the more common, and being OK with that. I thought it was boring for a long time.
That reminds me of something you said that really helped me out once! When I started studying herbalism, I wanted to do it the way I do everything. I was like, I need to know every single plant and every single detail about them and get all these monographs memorized and know everything! And you shared something about getting to know one plant really well, and I was like, oh, duh. If you think about it as a relationship — you know, I’m not trying to get to know every single thing about every single human. You can figure out which ones have been there for you already, and which ones you already have this relationship with, and just get to know them well. I think you were a conduit for this advice, and it was pretty revolutionary for me!
I think I heard Rosemary Gladstar say that at one of our Mother Earth News Fairs, and I kind of had the same reaction. Like, “That makes sense, totally!”
What are you excited to be growing in your garden right now?
Like I mentioned earlier, I’m really excited my chamomile is growing successfully this year. I got an awesome tip from my friend Jess, who runs Sacred Sun Farm outside of Lawrence, and she told me that if you start the seedlings in fall and then transplant them out so they can get a little bit established before your first frost comes, they’ll overwinter, because they’re pretty cold-tolerant, and then they’ll pop off in early spring. I didn’t know that! I always just planted them in spring and then transplanted them out and didn’t get good results. So I’m really happy about that.
And then, I’m also having really good luck with California poppy this year for the first time. So I’m kind of excited to have that first interaction. I’m going to make some tinctures to keep by our bed and help us sleep.
So those two, I’m excited about, because they’re new to me in terms of my garden. And then, I’m like, obsessed with tulsi, or holy basil. I dedicate an entire garden bed to it each year, and I’m hooked. I drink it in tea all winter. And I love it more and more every year, because it always self-seeds really easily, so once you have it in your garden once, it’ll probably just keep coming back for you. It’s no work, it grows all summer, and even once it gets super, super hot here, in July and August, it’s native to India, so it’s just loving life when everything else is wilted and done. So that makes me really happy.
I’m also always, always in love with my motherwort. She’s like 8 feet tall, so tall! And just living her best life. Motherwort is the one that I find myself speaking to the most. That’s definitely the one where my neighbors are probably like, “Oh, god, she’s out there, at it again, having a full-on conversation!”
Hell, yeah!
I really feel a kinship with motherwort. It’s one where I feel more perceptive to it. I know to tincture motherwort; that’s the main way I know how to use it and that I’ve used it in the past and had good results. So lately, I was standing out there, and I was like, “Will you show me other ways to use you? Because I really want you in my life more, but I’m not a huge tincture-taker. But you taste really bitter, so I don’t want you in tea. What do I do with you?” And … OK. You’re the crazy plant lady for sure. Time to go in.
No, I love this. So what did you hear back?
It was just a couple days ago! So I’m still kind of waiting. I’m really hoping this recipe flashes across my screen, or I open a book to the just-right page. You know, one of those experiences! And find something new. Maybe someone will read this interview and email me something! (Please do.)
I was going to ask if there’s a plant you connect with on a spiritual level, and it sounds like motherwort is that plant for you?
Yeah, it is. It’s interesting, because I’m not a huge tincture-taker. My body’s really sensitive to alcohol, especially the older I get. I feel like I’ll be hungover if I just, like, look at alcohol. It’s ridiculous. So for that reason, I’m always a little on the fence about tinctures. Maybe a cool way to experiment with motherwort this year is to make a glycerine preparation!
But despite not liking tinctures, anytime I take my motherwort tincture, I feel such a profound shift happening in me, mentally and energetically, stronger than any other preparation or herb that I work with. It’s so interesting.
I remember the first time I took motherwort, it was actually when we were at the magazines, and we were on deadline, and whenever I get really stressed, my heart gets kind of fluttery, like heart palpitations. And that’s something that motherwort is good at helping with, so that caught my attention. And I was working away at my computer, and I started to feel that stress bubble up, you know, get it done, get it done, pressure’s on! So I took my motherwort tincture, set it down, and then forgot that I took it.
And 20 more minutes went by, and that cyclical stress started to bubble up again, and then — and motherwort is known for this, but it was just crazy to have it happen so clearly — as my stress bubbled up, it was as though this wall came up, and was just like, girl, quit it. Stop. You do not need to go here right now. You got this, you’re strong, you’re smart, you’re working on it, you’re doing everything you can, you don’t need to add this negative stress cycle to everything you’re already doing! Just drop it! And it shocked me, because I forgot I took the tincture. It was definitely the strongest, most immediate response I’ve ever had working with a plant.
I love that! It’s satisfying to take herbs anyway, but when you can really feel how they’re in communication with your body, it’s so nice.
Yeah! It helps you really see, OK, we’re not just interacting with plants because it’s whimsical or witchy or old-fashioned. It’s legit, it’s real, we’re experiencing shifts in our bodies and our minds and our spirits, and we can see it and feel it. So cool!
What is your current relationship with the sun, or the moon, or the stars?
You know, I feel like I’m a little disconnected from the sky. I feel like I spend so much of my time looking down at what’s growing around me that I don’t spend that much time looking up, and this kind of inspires me to look up.
I work inside a lot during the day, so I guess my biggest relationship with the sun right now is through photography. I always run outside when it’s that golden hour, those few hours at dawn and those few hours at dusk. And in the morning is when I’ve been doing all my gardening, because it’s so hot. So I guess I’d say that’s the time of day I’m most connected with right now. Those twilight, dawn, and dusk times. But there’s not a lot to look at in those moments! The sun’s not really out, because it just set, and the moon and stars definitely aren’t out, so it’s more just enjoying the quality of light than it is observing any particular feature.
I love that you’re working with the sun in those ways. Are there any other routines or rituals that keep you grounded throughout your day or week?
Both of our dogs are 13 now, they’re so old, but the one thing they still get really, really excited about is going to the dog park. So pretty much every day around 3 or 4 p.m., they start to shake themselves off and come over and be like, OK, let’s go! So that’s one that always really helps me, because it’s a nice mix of getting away from my computer and also getting a little exercise, and Jake and I usually go together, so we kind of talk and laugh at the dogs, and it’s just a really nice break.
In summer, I really love to take little breaks and run outside and, it’s small, but what I love to do is make … I’m obsessed with sparkling water, I don’t know if you remember that about me, I drink sparkling water like all freakin’ day.
I do. And I could probably match you on that these days!
It’s so good!
So good.
I just love to make a big thing of sparkling water and, especially when it’s this hot out, run outside to the garden and just harvest a couple pinches of a bunch of different things. A little bit of peppermint, a couple of calendula leaves, some tulsi, whatever I just want to look at, and I stuff it down into my glass. And it takes me like five minutes, but it’s just this little recurring thing that I do every day. It makes me feel refreshed, it gets me outside, I step away from my computer, and then it brings me joy all day because every time I look at my glass, it’s just filled with little happy flowers.
Is there anything else on your mind that you’d like to share with the eClips list?
For some reason, the thing that comes to mind — this is so random, and maybe it’s just because it’s what I’m in the mood to do right now — I just want to tell everyone, go swimming! Put your body in some water, float on your back, feel the sun on your face. Get in the water, friends. Go swimming! It’s Gemini season. Have some fun!
I love that! I’m going to take your advice. I’m going to find a way.
It’s so refreshing. It’s one of those things where I feel like you never regret it.