My year-long relationship with mugwort

I reconnected to my best friend from childhood recently and we discovered that we both work with an individual plant for about one year. Like we have a 'plant of the year'. But not on purpose, this just emerges for us organically.

I first started working with mugwort at a Samhain ceremony in 2022. After that wild ride of an introduction, I saw her everywhere I looked. We whispered to each other. So I picked her, harvested her, drank her in tea every day, made her into smudge sticks and smoked her in my bedroom before I slept. I played with a mugwort spray, mugwort lip balm, and mugwort oil. I hosted a mugwort ceremony with 17 women...

Clearly, my body needed to receive her medicine. (That’s how wise our beautiful bodies are - they just know what they need to receive from the earth - we don’t have to DO anything to find out - just listen.) 

So I really came into relationship with mugwort. She revealed herself to me day by day, month by month, and she weaved her energy into my body at a cellular level. And I turned my body into an ear so I could hear her. 

During the year of mugwort, I left the job I had for 14 years where I had recently been promoted, I consciously separated from my husband, and I picked up my home and moved it to Stroud where I knew no one. 

I attended a talk with Nathaniel Hughes @intuitiveherbalism and he said something like: 'be careful if you’re working with mugwort, you might end up leaving your partner and/or your job!' To which I almost fell off my chair! I did not know that in my brain, but my body clearly did know that she was an epic truth serum. 

Anyway, mugwort clearly had her way with me that year, for which I am deeply grateful. 

Since the waters have settled in my body, my roots have sank into these beautiful fertile Cotswolds lands, and I am feeling deliciously full in myself again, I am working daily with another beautiful plant: cacao… That's a story for another time.