Friends,
Today’s word is medicine.
I’ve been continually struggling with what our medicine is for. As a writer, I can’t just live within my own world, within my own medicine. It is to be shared with others, for our healing, for our care.
So, we tend to our hearts, our own sacred centers, and then we take that medicine out to the world.
What is your medicine?
As Bear clan, my ancestors gathered the Medicine for the people-- the stuff of the earth that always kept us going, kept us connected and safe. As humans, we all keep medicine, whether it’s our words, the plants we harvest season after season, the creative ways we show up in this world to remind others they aren’t alone. Medicine does nothing if it isn’t shared, given when we are sick and hungry, administered to those who are dying, kept and nurtured in the quiet before we let it make its magic out there in the chaos.
"Medicine does nothing if it isn't shared" - I love these lines, Kaitlin ❤️ your concept of words and writing as medicine really inspired my poem today:
***
Here, take these words
let them grow like
seeds inside
your heart
let the syllables turn
to roots strong enough
to lift up any song
so when you are grieving
you may wail
when you are ecstatic
you may shout
and when the notes fade
you know
you are held
in the silence
held in the trust
that those root words
will bloom again
writing a healed world
into your hands
giving you seeds
to plant and
make it so
What is healing?
I start to draw dots
between science and magic
and comfort and mystery
and tenderness and laughter
and words and stillness
and art and hands in the earth
and hands in my hair
and hands in my hands
and hands in connection
and connection
and connection
and connections like constellations,
like things we already know -
have known,
deep down -
for as long as we have known the stars,
for as long as we have been,
they draw themselves.
The medicine,
the hope,
the connection;
all is never truly lost.