fuck love potions, I want community

I’m not lifting a leaf to help you catch a man this year.

I didn’t pour potions or perfumes for freakish vibes this valentine’s day. Frankly, the idea of fucking feels kind of foreign to me at this point of *gestures around.*

As the community curandera, I’m the person people look to when they wish to find love; when they want to call it, crush it, or commandeer it. For quite some time I’ve made everything from baños to spiritual waters for magnetism, romance, and getting laid. With my ancestors’ blessings, I’ve helped people get fucked and felt and free, and myself occasionally. 

But this year is a different tune.

I sincerely believe the herbs animate us. Plants tell us how they want to be worked and our hands are simply filling commands from Spirit. I realized most of the formulas I’ve made over the last year hold the common themes of communal care, expanding our perception of love, and going deeper into ourselves. The messages the plants conveyed as I brought the works together were intense to say the least. But as time passed, I could understand why. 

Something else I’m coming to understand is how deep the work of loving is, and how flattening it is an affront to life itself. When we misunderstand love, we flatten the world. We jump the gun because we’re lonely and act confused when a stranger is in our bed. We fail to get to know those closest to us because we assume we have them figured out. We play into spirals of false ideas to avoid the work of building intimacy with those we say we love. We make the world one-dimensional through a lack of love, and it spreads to other species.

 We forget other animals are capable of complexity, and seeing them express emotion becomes confusing to us. We do scientific studies on things our spirit knows. We treat plants like they don’t have agency, like they are ‘for’ things instead of capable of many things, and forget their sentience beyond their abilities. 

Lovelessness becomes forgetting. Love becomes curiosity.

I want us to remember the base medicine of loving. Loving as knowing the most erotic, dense parts of the story our spirits are building thru lifetimes. Loving as the fearlessness of being communal, where your issues shrink because they’re shared and therefore feel infinitesimal. Loving as in weaving both states together and becoming mycelial, with hyphae as hearing each other for real. 

In this piece, I’ll talk about the processes of combining formulas for these medicines, their feels, and why they make sense in the world we live in to create the world we want.

LOVE YR HEART

Came about in the earlier stages of covid. As a response. As an epiphany. I was working at a cafe in Ridgewood while falling in love with a they/them states away, and the beauty of Spring. High off the sight of stalks holding violet blooms and daffodils warding off winter blues. 

 On a meandering walk with a belly full of top-tier Italian food, I stumbled across her. A heavily-laden Hawthorn, asking if I would hold her berries if she shared them. I was enamored. Hawthorn trees were coming up so much for me at the time, and I wanted to take care of my heart and lungs. The tree local to me was having a hard time producing berries. She was going thru a hard time, like me emotionally.

I was noticing more and more people getting sick with vascular woes. I wanted to do something about it, then I realized…all my closest allies at the time were working within the realms of the heart and lungs! They were screaming at the same time because they wanted to be combined! Astragalus the mage, the leader who knows the nooks and crannies of the immune system; Motherwort the true, a heavenly friend who balances the heart, nerves, emotions and womb;  and Hawthorn who shields us while bringing some sense into us. Teaching us to measure our decisions with how we intend to feel. 

This tincture supports the heart, lungs, and nervous system. It soothes, sensitizes, and pulls excess salt from the body. It is love and calm bottled. I especially love the interplay of Motherwort and Hawthorn and the way Hawthorn acts as a door where Motherwort cleans house and shows us where stagnant emotions live in our body. Astragalus highlights all those places, with their far reach and renown, and they merge with a few other beauties to complete cycles.

Cempasuchil Medicines

This summer marked my second year making Fearless. Flower Essence. The first year, I worked Cempasuchil (Mexican Marigold) I grew in the Bronx. This is my favorite picture of them.

This year’s batch felt more urgent. I was doing a flower essence workshop at my good friend’s garden. As always, he was telling me to make myself at home, which was easy because the garden spilled light. I’m talkin’ sunflowers that croon to the sky; hibiscus and poppies that have brought me to tears on multiple occasions, and the bliss of queerness being held with care. And Cempasuchil. So, so much of her, in different shades and sizes.

They told me humans need to hold on to each other. To be fierce with that love and how we look at each other. When I looked at the flowers, the ways they interacted felt indicative of their message: multicolored blossoms leaning on one another, sharing light and reseeding far and wide with respect to neighboring plants. The intensity radiating off them scared me. 

They told me we have to be fearless. That loving each other, knowing each other, and asking the questions we have a tendency to avoid, would open portals we could not yet imagine. This essence feels like exactly that, and I’ve been told by folks who received it that it helped them do the same. This essence teaches me that in the belly of fear, portals to beautiful worlds live. I’ve re-learned to let myself learn, let myself be imperfect, let myself out of the cycles of doubt over what was born mine, let myself live out sweeter timelines and–what I find to be most sweet–recall fear as a tool of pretend, an emotion God cleverly created to give resistance to our brilliance. 

I made 3 expressions of this medicine: the flower essence, an Aguita (spiritual water, something like a florida water) with rue and friends, and a beautiful oil holding the medicine of weaving us together.

The water, called Cempa Sootha, is a beautiful energetic cleanser. It was one of those medicines that called to be made, like a craving. Energizing, light, cleansing and very protective, this water is versatile in how they like to be worked. This week I led a past life/ancestral journey with some good friends and I sprayed this girlie on everyone. She is deeply supportive in the work of remembering, recovering soul pieces, of uncovering our relationship to how the past shapes the present and future. 

The oil, Spiritweaver, was an even bigger craving. This medicine…is the kind that can only be experienced. They took months of stewing. My bruja girlies know the time they take says they’re chatting up in there, ok. Spiritweaver can be worked for mending bones and closing wounds (big comfrey energy) but like the other two medicines, supports the process of soul retrieval as well.

Making medicines makes life magickal. Being able to see folks get ungunked too is a rush. I hope reading this was sweet for you. I’m currently having a huge clearout of medicines, so if these interest you or if any of my essences do, know that every order gets free gifts included! I also work these medicines in soul retrievals, so if you sit with me for one IRL this is what we finna have. All of that can be found on my site.

If you’re a plant person, lets chat about plant friends. I wanna know who you’re workin’, and what you’re workin’ on. :) 

And above all, make friends with the trees around you. The fuzzy plants and the new shoots and the bustling blooms. Learn something. You don’t have to be anything other than yourself to do it.