The secret uses of wormwood

I first met wormwood as a child in my best friend’s garden. Her mother was a passionate gardener and she planted a field by the house with shrubs. One of these was wormwood and we used to brush against it playing chasy, or hide among the branches, crushing leaves in our hands as we waited to be found. After Helen’s garden, my next experience with wormwood was during a course I did on Plant Mysteries. My teacher, Bianca Patetl, brought cuttings from her garden and offered each of us some to take home and plant. I am a scrounging gardener — I like to scrounge suckers, or cuttings, or seeds that other people don’t need — and so I took some of Bianca’s cuttings and put them in my soil and watched them grow.

At the time the cuttings were given I was aware that this plant was the same as the one I had brushed against as a child. It had the same soft, feathery leaves and hard woody stems, and the same pungent, bitter-sweet smell and it brought back bitter-sweet memories of my childhood best friend who is now dead. After it grew to a considerable size I put its branches in my cat basket to prevent worms and in the chook’s nesting boxes for the same reason. But more than either of those things was its usefulness when my tendency to try things before knowing what they are got me into strife.

There’s a beautiful area of bushland near me, the old Koala Park, with walking paths cut into the side of a hill. The path crosses a few gullies, hugs the side of a ridge, and dissects a creek valley with bridges in two parts. I went walking there with a friend one day and our children, my baby in a carrier on my back. When we got to the creek gully I picked some leaves off a plant that reminded me of carrot tops. Thinking it related, I nibbled on a piece. Later, I asked Yonke if she knew what it was and she said it was poison hemlock and I immediately spat out what was left in my mouth.

My fear at the time was for my daughter who was still breastfeeding, and whether she would get it through my milk. It was not enough to poison me or her in any noticeable, physiological way, but what it did do was to induce a state of mind in me where living or dying seemed equally attractive and within reach. I was scared for my children to be in this state, with no aversion to death and my (healthy) resistance to it gone, as if a gate had been opened that I usually kept closed.

To give you some background to this story, this is not the first time that I have had encounters with death. When I was much younger I had anorexia nervosa and starved myself to death’s door. Only when I got to that point of dying did I realise I didn’t want it for myself. I was called back to life and embarked on the long, slow process of learning how to live. During my recovery period, I was terrified that death would take me before I was ready, before I had a chance to recover and really live. I don’t have those fears anymore. And I am not consciously aware of holding a fear of death, but a healthy resistance to it yes.

Because I feared for my children, of what might become of them if the illusion of equality — between dying and living — got the better of me, I wanted to do something about it to shift the feeling and to lift the cloak of darkness that hung around me as a result of tasting that poisonous plant. Among my herb books I have a book called ‘Seven Herbs, Plants as Teachers’ by Matthew Wood. I was reading the entry on Sagebrush, which is an artemisia, where it is written, ‘members of the artemisia family grow in areas of great desolation, such as the Russian Steppes and the rangelands of western North America. In less desolate environments they still fill the same niche, inhabiting road cuts, artificial land fills and overgrazed pastureland. Wherever there is devastation, look for them. They are mother nature’s promise that even in the midst of such unnatural destruction life will spring up anew.’ That last sentence really struck me, that in the midst of unnatural destruction life would spring up anew, for his words mirrored my state of mind and spoke of a solution.

I went outside and said hello to my wormwood, artemisia absinthium, and told her what I needed: some leaves to make a good strong brew. For a few days or maybe even weeks I drank the bitter wormwood tea. And what I noticed was this: the wormwood created a greyness in the darkness of my aura like smoke. And wherever the smoke was, light could get in. This surprised me at first. I do not think of smoke as allowing the penetration of light into dark places. Nor greyness either. But that is what happened and I will be forever grateful that it did. As I sat within the experience, I came to understand why you might smoke someone as they entered into ritual space, or onto your property, or your lands. Its purpose is not in cleansing, not in the way of water, or high frequency energies, or qualities of sound, scent, or light, but if one has darkness in their aura it allows the penetration of light.

The other thing I noticed is that the smoke allows you to see things, if you know how to look for them. The smokiness of the wormwood in my vibration, and the smoke of a smudge stick, or a bundle of wet leaves thrown on a fire. For someone with a trained eye the smoke shows up things in the aura or vibration which might otherwise be hidden, so that all is laid bare in a person before they enter into sacred space, or onto the lands of a people, for if my understanding is right, smoking was customary among some first nations peoples in Australia when they entered onto other peoples lands. Used in this way, the smoke becomes a screening tool, like a metal detector in an airport, to see if there are things that someone is hiding that they may or may not know are there. The point being not to interrogate that person for what is hidden in their vibration, but to be aware of it in any dealings with that person, or in sharing a sacred space.

In the darkness surrounding covid in these last few tumultuous years, the medicine of wormwood is very valuable. For it creates a smokescreen that shows us what is really there, and allows for light to penetrate. Or if you’re like me, you might just want to use it on your house, to see if there are things hiding in the corners that don’t have bodies and that ought not to be there. Because once you’ve seen them, you can make a plan to evict them, or find them better lodgings that are more suitable and nourishing to all.

Originally published at https://inthematrix.substack.com on January 29, 2022.