Lavender came into my awareness several times over the last few weeks, asking for her own love letter. What would a herbal be without me? She seemed to say. Even a herbal that is so far half poetry half patchwork.
It’s true, said I, that you have been a good friend to me, but we have not journeyed together deeply enough yet for the words to flow. Have you ever made a challenge to a plant spirit? I should have known better.
It was raining and I was restless. There is a feral part of me on days like these, in certain moon phases, in the rise and fall of my inner tides, that longs to tear my skin off and howl with the electric currents running up my spine.
As a young girl I was sure that everybody could tell I was an animal pretending to be a human, betrayed by body hair, scent and blood. I remember being arrested by a bottle of Femfresh in the shower of an older woman that I knew, horrified with the sudden awareness that my worst fear was true, this was something I was supposed to scrub away. A relief to give birth to my first child and feed him with my body, to know that I had been right all along about my animal nature. Comfortable in my skin for the first time.
And yet…
There are some days the skin feels tight again and begins to erupt with feathers and patches of fur. And on this particular day nothing was going right, my teeth felt too sharp for my mouth, my fingers wringing together like claws wanting to grasp onto something. I sat next to my husband in the car and sobbed and sobbed. Only a hundred years ago he could have had me incarcerated with hysteria.
The things that are “wrong” with me make quite an extensive list. These days I measure out my energy like a precious elixir. As I am tempted to pray for death in between the throbs of my head the ancestral spirits and the plants whisper stories in my ear.
The pain is the portal to my best work, and I can even now hear the spiritual gurus in their cunning voices saying “see? You don’t want to get better. There has to be a reward to make illness worth it otherwise we wouldn’t create it.”
Maybe they are right. In the depths of trauma therapy I began to become concerned that all of this was to try to make me a balanced and healthy person by the standards of patriarchal society. Was therapy a ruse to tame the wild spirit? After all, to be “healthy” in therapeutic terms was to be able to go back to the place that mentally tortured me and be able to stay calm and tolerate further abuse.
Apparently most people when they get a cut will put a plaster on it and move on. I seemed to enjoy making artwork with the blood first. This was a problem for a society that likes everything to be neat and tidy, that sees women’s emotions as pathological.
As with all advice on anxieties and disorders there is always this imperative to be calm. In theory I agree with discussing things rationally, although the word is often used as a way to dismiss women’s intuition. Rationally feels like eating a sensible balanced meal when you want to gorge on what your heart desires.
Some well-meaning person giving advice on staying calm, and I have been this person, will say - “have you thought about trying lavender oil?” the very phrase conjuring up ideas of sanitised spas, white towels, and tidy women taking you somewhere cleaner and blander. Your emotions are uncomfortable for me. Please be calmer.
But calm does not equal regulated. I have been terrifyingly calm when I wish I could have screamed. Sometimes it makes me shake and sweat in remembered fear.
Lavender is feral, and she is not the Femfresh of mental health. Have you seen her? Spilling over the pot in which you contained her, pruned back only to come back thicker and muskier. Tied to bed frames for protection like a fierce lioness protecting her cub.
The lavender bags made from the garden when the lavender is taking over again. I am secretly thrilled when plants take over, no matter how inconvenient. I hope one day they do.
I was sobbing in the car and the only thing I could think to do was to take the lavender bag I keep on the gearstick and crush it between my grasping fingers and inhale her scent. Reminding me of who I was.
I stood in the rain in my thin summer dress and let it soak me. Return, return, lavender seemed to be saying. Not to a place that is calm and lifeless but to a place that is wilder. My husband placed his coat on my shoulders. It was only later I became aware of, at the moment did not have the words to say - meet me on this mountain and only then will l let you lead me down again.
The first advice I was ever given from another doula was - you have to meet a woman where she is at. Whatever extreme emotion she is gripped by as her body opens up as an otherworldly portal, you need to show her that you can handle it by meeting her there. This is women’s work, the work of grandmothers who cackle and say “that’s life, dearie.”
This is what lavender does, as she embraces you and your wild nature. In her arms you are able to release and regulate. So I found a place on the damp earth where the wind blew hard and I danced with the butterflies.
Lavender comes from the French lavande, meaning, to wash. Not in a chemical stripping of everything that makes us deliciously womanly, but a sacred anointing that reminds us that we are both divine and human.
Jean-Yves Leloup wrote that humans are the bridge between animals and angels and the spiritual journey lies in illuminating the places where they intersect. I have found this to be true. Lavender deeply regulates us, not by making us calm but by witnessing our pain and weaving the wild with the holy.
Later that day, while serving another woman with a drum beat and a stream of light, with the spirit of the jaguar in my lap as I sang of bloody thighs and crone eyes with my crown chakra spinning. I wed the animal to the angel and walked myself down the mountain.
