The Botany of Death

I lie alone in a white room. Quarantine, Phasmatis, dawn breaking. Shielded by blackout curtains and my own two hands. My skin is cool and clammy as the fever has broken. Prayers have been answered. I am free and craving heaviness so that I no longer float away. I wish to be relieved of air and pressure; floating backwards, reaching surface. Herbs are strewn about the room - a poultice of horehound on my chest. To heal the body, combine a lover’s touch, root vegetables, fresh rosemary still on the stem, mushrooms with bones and stew. Ingest. Allow light in. Rise and check the soil of what you’re growing. Say thank you. Allow guitar riffs and resonant voices tether you to a seemingly distant ground.

In life lately, I remain Earthly and I work with plants to feel the essence of life, to check myself and to engage in a semblance of prayer. I cast it outward and intend. Their life force feels cool and tingling in my hands. It’s as if I can hear them speak through my own skin. It’s as if we have our own secret language. Plants are like humans in the way that they wither when they lack necessity. Thus, their care is simple if one pays attention. Moving their home to a sunny window instead of a darkened corner can resurrect them completely. In these moments, I am the controller of life and death. And I choose life, always. In return, I am granted with growth. I am on the receiving end of their protections. Flora never bites the hand that feeds. They recognize their friends and allies. And so, we live together in harmony. Their soil collects beneath my fingernails and I breathe them in - my pitcher waters their soil. I move them when they wilt. They move me when I do. We are cyclical in the tides that bind.

I have lived to see the life cycles of flora and fauna. I have seen many things die. Often, I exist bound by an inherited serotonin deficiency that causes obsession, hallucination, addiction, and lethargy, amongst other symptoms. This family curse took my Father’s life and my Grandmother’s life when I was a teenager. I was so young in body when I saw the losses of battle. When I saw white flags and surrender. When I found that Love and War are siblings but can be represented simultaneously by one God or one flower. The angel of death is a distant relative, erring on estranged. I give myself the gift of life when surrounded by death. Now is not the time of withering.

When my Grandmother took her life, I was there as a witness. She chose a painful exit - downing bottles and bottles of aspirin. Causing her body to collapse from the inside out. I sensed her death with visions of wilting flowers before I found the evidence: a note that read “I can’t do this anymore” and her signature. Empty aspirin bottles lay scattered on the floor. Something took over me in this moment. She lie on her bed, crying out in pain. Her body had entered emergency protocol and was emptying by every way imaginable. The air had an odor of utter collapse and death. I knew that she was beyond saving and that she had succeeded. I knew that she did not know where she was going next. I stood there at the foot of her bed with my arms outstretched, as if I was meant to receive her or embrace her spirit when it arose from it’s vessel. I was the guardian of her passage; the light that she would follow to an infinite beyond. I spoke words over her that I cannot remember. When the ambulance finally came and took her away, her soul had already left her body. I never saw her again. Even in moments of meditation or ancestor work, she never comes through. I like to think that she is completely disconnected from this realm, as she wanted. In a garden on the other side of the universe, growing towards a different sun.

Singers and seers. Seekers, sinners and saints: you are what you think you are, and aren’t. When I tell you that light is all exposing and healing, accept it as truth. We move towards it at beginning and end, through a brief, transitional darkness. Our flora seedlings grow towards the distant sun, while buried underground. To work with light is to work with life and what is seen. To work with darkness is to simply work with transmutation and divine shift. To embody both is to embody the sacred cycle of what is.

This life has been chosen by you, as will be your next. You are a magician, a sybil, and a scribe. Your curiosity breeds observation and intelligence. Your defiance defines you. We all bare gifts and specific training. With this knowing, I have survived and have summoned a force of will that rides on the backs of every ancestor that runs through my veins. My power is within my persistence and my absolute inability to do as I’m told. Power and choice have a unique bond. From girlhood, I have studied demonic entities and their association with the Goddess. I have pondered this. Sacred is the flora to the magician that contains a deathly poison or a razor sharp thorn. Like Flora, I have harnessed my divinity and force from all that has been lost, myself included. I have renounced expectation and altered defeat. I have re-seeded. Now, I speak this: what is harvested can be reborn in the soil once more if we simply intend. If we rework our soil and save our seeds. When all elementals are combined, life begins anew. Death is simply transition and my only purpose in life is discovery alone.

The Queen of Wands dances blindly with Joan of Arc. Through my newfound clarity, I see that the time of the Priestess is now. To learn thyself, unmasked, unwavering. To learn all that grows beneath our feet. As this gives us insight into our inner most working. We are to work side by side with our environment. With this understanding, I believe that I have at last begun to make sense of what is. The fog has been banished from me and what remains are small, voiceless clues that I have left for myself via flower language and botanical delights, guiding me only to where I now stand.

The Earth is a prophet and a mystic. Medicine appears where it is needed as if the planet can project our physiological response to environmental stress or disease. Invasive flora is a silent scream to be noticed and an answer to our questions. The botanical world knows us better than we can comprehend. Plants are unlike humans in the way that they always strive to do good and they give themselves freely. They are silent because they want us to seek the lesson. Even though they are so closely connected to our Mother, they do not attach themselves to the earthly coil - they effortlessly trust the natural process. They grow wiser with each incarnation, just as we do. They embody the symbiosis of beauty and decay. When I attempt to comprehend death and to make sense of what I have seen, that is what I think of. The perfection of flowers and how we will all return to them in time.

I pull the death card. Serpentskirt, fresh linens, weariness of flames. I choose to give my own meanings to experience. To be my own psychic. To become the master of death. I read “The highest art form is that of artful relationships,” as the definition for Temperance and I bury my hands in soil. I meet my eyes in reflective waters. “Inhaling rosemary oil can evaporate trauma,” the herbalist on the television says. I light a white candle for the angel of Death. My fears are dissolving. Clouds parting, seeds sewn, a green colored lens to view a life-everlasting.

Conception of a Life-Long Desire

Playlist no. 3: she’s so heavy