What if your ancestral medicine is ibuprofen?
Greenwood Cemetery in Brooklyn, NY.
Before my community herbalist program began, I asked to receive a dream. I received three dreams leading up to my first class.
In the first dream, I was in my family’s backyard with a group of people who were planting fully grown trees. I clung to the highest branch of a tall tree like a ship mast while the others lifted the tree and paraded me around the yard. I pointed, trying to direct them to the best spot.
In the second dream, I was looking out the window of an apartment. Outside, a worker was cutting down a skinny street tree. I tried to persuade him to stop. Then I walked outside and tried to salvage the dismembered branches.
The last dream was completely different. I was holding my grandmother’s corpse. Although she passed away more than fifteen years ago, her limp body was completely intact. I sat on the floor holding her like I had rescued her from drowning and dragged her from the ocean. A woman stood over us and performed a healing ceremony. She channeled messages from my grandmother that I no longer remember.
On my first day of class, I was placed in a breakout room to talk about my family’s ancestral medicines. I felt jealous of others who had living grandmothers and traditions of working with plants. Grandmothers who made herbal teas for digestion or cooked traditional foods. I thought of my partner’s family and their olive jars full of fennel seeds and foraged sage. It would take a decade of formal education for me to reach that level of knowledge.
“I think my ancestral medicine is ibuprofen,” I confessed to the group.
When I was a kid, I was sick all the time. I had recurring strep throat, asthma, weak digestion, and blistering acne. My mom would get me a McDonald’s milkshake anytime I had a stomach bug because she thought it was easy to digest. This is the worst possible thing you could give a person who has a stomach ache.
Digging deeper, I remembered my mom’s supermarket basil growing in the kitchen window and her prolific tomato harvests. I also recalled our trips to the farmer’s market where she would mostly just buy more tomatoes. She used to take me to plant nurseries, where I would roam the gravel pathways and memorize the names of flowers. Iris, cockscomb, periwinkle.
My parents only spend summers in my childhood home and plan to sell it, but every year my mom still insists on planting tomatoes and zucchinis in the yard. The suggestion of not planting a garden infuriates her. Like me, she has a longing to connect with the earth, although I don’t think she would use the same wording.
In healing my relationship with the land and expanding my traditional skills, I’m trying to suture wounds that are older than me. When my mother was an embryo inside of my grandmother’s body, I was a cell in my mother’s body. I carry generations of memory within me. My actions may heal more than just my wound. I hope the effects reverberate in all directions, sending electric currents back in time. Maybe I really can heal my grandmother. Maybe I can salvage the branches.
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Dream Practice
In honor of the dark encroaching winter, I invite you to incubate a dream. Before you go to sleep, you can write your intention in a journal or on a piece of paper. You might ask to dream with an ancestral plant. You could ask for a specific one or simply write “an ancestral plant” in your journal. Alternatively, you could ask to connect with a well and loving ancestor. When you wake up, write down whatever you remember, even if it seems mundane or irrelevant. Whenever I ask to dream with my ancestors, I have dreams about trees. That doesn’t mean that the dream is irrelevant - that’s information! Try doing this practice for several consecutive nights and see what comes up.
Plants that can support this practice:
Mugwort can lead us to other plants
Elder (berry or flower) can support us in connecting with land spirits and ancestors
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