mugwort: dream weaver and womb keeper

we’re pretty well at the end of mugwort season around here. the mugwort is flowering, but past its prime, turning toward the darkening seasons, yellowing, bursting blossoms. we do harvest mugwort when it’s flowering but just as the blossoms begin to develop their tiny round balls. now in late august they are in full wild witchy explosion - arms spread wide to the sky, fertile and free. we love this look on you mugwort mama, but not the best for medicine making.

but i really wanted more harvest this season, to make enough oil to get us through the winter months until she returns next spring. sometimes when i’m looking for more and there isn’t enough in the garden i kind of put out the call - feeling out into the land, wondering if an answer might come of where i should look. i visited two spots she’s come to me before and they weren’t right. one was very past the harvest window, and another was just a little bit, not enough to take from the land in this place, and in case that message wasn’t already heard {which it was} there were two coyote sisters guarding their streambed home. it was a beautiful visit, and i heard that mugwort is done for this season and i’ll see her next year.

it’s been a year like that for me - having another baby in the late spring it’s been a slow and meandering medicine making season. i’ve missed some things, harvest windows and plant blooms and it’s been part of the story of this turn of the wheel… it’s my season to nourish this new tiny one, and make the medicine that calls and comes, but some will pass and we’ll come back to it next year. this is dynamic relationship, feels right. 

but i felt like one more harvest, just enough for one more batch of oil would feel really good; i felt it out there. i went to visit an old garden i planted many years ago at my childhood home. no one is watering or caring for this land, and i know most of my medicine plants were ripped up many years ago. but i just thought, maybe… and there she was. so much mugwort! way more than i expected to find there in that little patch, and she really was the only thing growing there besides weeds. it definitely felt like a coming together, an offering, an answer. in the forgotten garden, a thousand weeds and grass and overgrown wild there was mugwort in abundance. 

we grow and use the california native mugwort {artemesia douglasiana} because it feels like it belongs here. mugwort and the artemisia family is native to so many of our ancestral traditions, wherever we come from in the world, but the mugwort that belongs to this land we occupy and steward and tend is this one. i also think it’s one of the most mystic, potent, and beautiful varieties. it makes a very dark black-green oil that glimmers opaque blood red in the sunshine. truly gasp-worthy. it seems ancient and liminal. 

we used some yesterday morning on a brand new mother’s womb; she brings warmth and nourishment to the blood spaces, the womb world. contraction. holding.