MATRIARCH MEDICINALS is my revival story.

It was in the thick of lockdowns when I came across an old postcard I'd picked up from an apothecary shop in 2019. The postcard was promoting something unfamiliar to me: a medicinal herb CSA.

As fate would have it, I was living in close proximity to this herb farm. I went online to see what the farmers were up to: digging up Echinacea root and Ashwagandha root for their first CSA distribution of the season, which was right around the corner. Two weeks later I found myself driving home a paper bag full of the most gorgeous, otherworldly smelling roots.

Stories I'd been conditioned to believe slowly started to dissolve. My skill set started to expand. Herbal medicine was no longer beyond my intuitive or intellectual reach. A potent source of agency brewed within as a result. To experience this during a time of ongoing personal and collective disempowerment was thrilling.

The covid isolation that would continue on that summer became a touch more tolerable, at times a tad magical. Where there was once a continuous silence constantly reminding me of my aloneness were now the voices of herbalists beaming out from my phone, following me from room to room.

From this concentrated time has come the development of meticulously crafted botanical skin care in addition to, perhaps more importantly, hands-on educational classes for those wishing to learn this for themselves. I feel personally called to educate children and caregivers.

I strongly believe we can lean into the wisdom of the more-than-human world in ways that are reciprocal, reverent and non-extractive. I believe this is possible without access to resources like generational wealth, institutional training or even the privilege of excessive free time. 

Our children will inherit the stories we carry as well as our relationships with the land that we have modeled to them whether consciously or unconsciously. We can embody the matriarchs within our lineage regardless of our ancestry and bring healing back into our bodies, our homes and our communities. 

Conscious embodiment, sovereignty and personal responsibility are what returned me back to my own wholeness and are the root system to which matriarch medicinals was birthed from.