For a while, I felt like my work was lots of fairly separate parts until I realised that there were many threads running through it. Threads that I had felt but threads that didn’t feel clearly visible, possibly to other people. One of those key threads is the idea of restoration after rupture.
Let me explain what I mean by rupture.
I think that we can see rupture when we look back at our history when we were (and continue to be in some places) forcibly displaced from the land, when our connection with it was severed. We see rupture when our spiritual practices were replaced by a dominating all pervading religion. We see rupture when our traditional healing was dismissed as old wives’ tales and replaced by the pharmacological industry. We see rupture when we were told that as women (or men) our bodies, our feelings and our thoughts were not important, and we were separated from our embodied knowing. We see rupture when the imperial empires marched across other lands. We see rupture when the influence of these traditions and their knowledge has been discounted and forgotten as part of modern Western herbalism. We see rupture when we are told that having a dysfunctional pelvic floor post baby or as we age is normal and something we have to live with. We see rupture when we silence our well-being and our needs and continue to grind in the capitalist world, not allowing ourselves time to heal. We see rupture when people are displaced, when they are unable to feel safe in their own lands or in the new lands who give them refuge. We see rupture in our disconnection from our roots and our ancestral lineages.
My work aims to sit within all of this to reconnect the fragments of the many ruptures. Through…
Historical herbalism → recovering and giving voice to lost knowledge, ancestral memory, folk practices, and wise women traditions. Reconnecting with our ancestral lineages.
Reimagining and recaiming the wise women → reclaiming, now marginalised forms of knowledge, that we were severed from, reclaiming healing authority, reconnecting us to the land, our plant kin, spirit; to the more than human world.
Research and writing → making meaning from all of it and giving it language.
Community remedies for refugees, homeless people, and other marganalised communities → reconnect from displacement through practical care for people experiencing displacement, instability, trauma, and loss of belonging.
Restore your core → To be able to root well energetically and spiritually, we need to heal our root and our core by healing these physical areas. But this is also about reconnecting with ourselves physically, emotionally, culturally, and spiritually. Reconnecting to our body, nervous system, grounding, breath, inner orientation. Enabling us to feel whole again.
Herbalism → Working with plants to reconnect to the land and sense of place. To heal fractured nervous systems. To reclaim lost knowledge.
Foraging waks → to reconnect with ancestral knowledge, our plant kin, and the land beneath our feet. Learning to see again so that the wild weeds become our teachers—inviting care, connection, and a deeper sense of belonging.
Women’s circles → Meeting in community to celebrate the changing seasons. Creating oral tradition, shared healing, witnessing, enabling women-centred knowledge exchange, and sacred crafting.
Clinics → individual restoration work. One-to-one support for: stress, depletion, disconnection, transitions, grief, nervous system overwhelm, and identity loss.
This, I have realised, is my work. This is what this patreon and my website are all about. But there are many ways to restore after rupture.
How are you restoring your wholeness after the systemic rupture we have all been through?