Estafiate y La Senora Rosa and Other Mugwort Musings…

Estafiate y La Senora Rosa and Other Mugwort Musings…

I approached Rosa’s house. New Mexico license plates proudly framed the entrance.  Her husband had a goat caged in the truck ready for slaughter. And humble rose bushes lined the chain link fence blooming in the rocky soil. An alfalfa farm grew across the road. As we did exercise together to assist with her cellulitis and get her back on her feet is when her stories rolled off her tongue.

Her husband wants to remove the rocks in the front yard, she said this is not good because they strengthen the soil beneath her. She wished for rain. Sky and mountain backdrop surrounded our bodies seated in rusted metal garden chairs as we exercised together.  For many years she was a cook in Guanajuato, Mexico. She remembers cooking endless stews for the patron who forgot that Rosa herself had to eat.

Clumsily, I asked her if she was an herbalist. She said no, but that her mother always had bags of herbs that she would buy from “la gente de la sierra”, the mountain people. She remembered seeing little slips of paper inside the carefully packaged herbs with its identification and its usage. “ My mother was always curious and said that herbs healed better than any medicine given by doctors. She insisted that we remained aware of them.” She recounts this story smiling.

There were a couple of plants, one a young sapling and another familiar plant adjacent to her trailer home that looked rather familiar except for its large leaves. Leaves were upward facing and spread in a double pyramid shape mirroring one another. I asked her what it was, “Estafiate” she said in a matter of fact manner.

Rosa told me about how estafiate was used for people “con bilis”, with the “bilis”. Bilis is someone with a temper. Estafiate helps calm them.

Michael Moore discusses “biliousness” and artemesia as a useful ally:

Frontal headaches, a bad taste in the morning, with a coated gruff tongue (and a coated, gruff personality) is what the terms means, usually the type of person hankering for lots of fat, poor quality meat and hydrogenated, crank case grease…some of the artemesias …have been shown to decrease the ill effects of lipid peroxides (rancid fats) on the liver.”

She explained specifically how she prepared it:

Put the whole plant in a pot to boil with a cover top. (She emphasized the importance of having a top to cover it) and let it simmer. Too much simmering can make it unpleasantly bitter, but if it is prepared right, you can drink it as a tea. It’s good for those people who possess anger and Mexican women rave about it, she says.

“Estafiate is one of the most important Mexican-American medicinal herbs, is used to treat a variety of common ailments. Since it is more potent if used fresh, it is often cultivated in kitchen gardens.” Joie Davidow –

Artemisia has been a close ally on moonlit nights. I was taught its medicine by first teacher Robin Rose Bennett who said it could induce dreams if drank, smudged or smoked. Dreams can be revelatory to the growing psyche and can provide yield signs for those consciously exploring them with the aid of artemesia or mugwort as it is called. Sometimes however, if one has had significant trauma artemesia can evoke unpleasant nightmares.

Once while hiking the Middle Fork by the Gila River, I came upon artemesia in flower. I had a bellyache, chewed on a couple of flowers and it seemed to ease some of the turbulence.

Once while visiting my friend, we had a back yard artemesia mini-bonfire in a Brooklyn building back yard. It was growing wildly. The scent sent us into giggles and the landlord threatened to call the fire marshal since tenants said we were smoking pot.

La senora Rosa had a stone mortar and pestle in her trailer home and she smiled and told stories of estafiate otherwise known as mugwort. Mugwort is a close ally of mine and an invaluable one to carry as tincture following long car rides.

I loved watching it sway in the breeze when I lived in New York. Its leaves upturned reflected its shiny white backside reminiscent of the moon. A woman can say that artemesia is great ally to bring on menstruation. And both men and women can find it helpful for digestive woes. I would say that this is a lovely plant to hold dear in one’s medicine bag. To cultivate a relationship by tasting, smelling, being with the Artemesias in these ways can strengthen our latent organoleptics and resurrect primal enlivened ways of being on Earth. 

I have had the fortune of being surrounded by Larrea tridentata in the lower desert elevation of the town of Truth or Consequences. This is an ode to chaparral otherwise known as Larrea tridentata, Creosote Bush or in Spanish communities Hediondilla which means smelly one. I am developing a new relationship with this plant not only as a physical medicine but also as a uncanny muse protrayed here.

Larrea, Mi Hediondilla, Wise Green One of the Desert
Oh Hediondilla, Larrea
Holder of soil of southern desert,
Soothe my cracked lips,
Cool the cracked earth,
Crack open your glands,
To Moisture in the open sky,
Open Heart of Chaparral,
Teach us your lessons,
Of cracked souls, soles, soils
That here in high desert, hot aquifers
spring internal lessons of the lost langorous
hag revived by your yellow blooms and resinous leaves
Rubbing against her leg with the snake rattle bracelet
Awake and focused!

My wise hag hugged me here
In this oppressive
Beautiful stillness
Larrea, I know why they call you
Hediondilla
Your smell can be both
 provocative and revolting
And an Utter relief
Follow a morning Rain

And I run with the coyotes within your
Scraggly branches
My sores are healed by you
And we howl and we claw playfully
Your song rises from the canyons
In an oily mist
There, there mi hijita
Mira la luna, llueve mucho
a veces in el desierto
There, there my daughter
Look at the moon, it rains much
at times in the desert

This blog is an amalgamation of sorts of flashbacks and flashpresents of my wild nature. I cannot say what it will become except that it is about my experience with plants and their medicine. 

My partner came upon a butterfly party nestled on top of southwest beebalm  (Monarda menthaefolia). They were slurping up its peppery juices. I should not say that. Within my constitution, they taste peppery and hot. As beebalm settles past my tastebuds and into my innards, they possess a diffusive, cooling quality; I wonder how they taste to butterflies? Gathering them alongside what looked like prunella vulgaris (self-heal) brought me into the intense presence of not so distant thunder above the ponderosa and douglas fir. Is this what being an herbalist is about? I know that my itchy legs are okay in these tall grasses. I learn to trust the process of wildcrafting. And while I know all these sensations are a coming home of sorts, I lean into some more grassy experiences despite my discomfort.
All along this creek and not more than one hundred yards grew a plethora of plants, I am coming to know: plantain, monkeyflower (mimulus guttatus), yerba mansa , monarda menthaefolia (beebalm)  and Rosa Woodsii.
Tassel Earred squirrel scrambled down the vanilla scented bark. My partner liked to hunt them as a kid in Meadow Creek. He knows this land from his childhood and points out Quercus hyperleucoides / Silver leaf oak and Southwestern White Pine. Southwestern White pine from my personal eyes looks much like the White Pine out East. I've yet to make medicine with it.
Medicine comes in many forms, yet what I am speaking of reveals the medicine of my direct experience in the woods of Meadow Creek. Medicine can take the form of a story. And this blog will tell a raw story. These upcoming stories blend into the herbal medicines I make in the form of tea blends, tinctures, salves, ointments, liniments and infusion. For example, this afternoon Meadow Creek oozed a trickle of water which nourished a community of plants interspersed between rocks. The sky was unusually clouded and thunder and moisture pervaded the air. I mindfully gathered beebalm and plantain. My white dog scampered nearby and alerted me to a large sound in the brush in the hills above. Mellilotus / White sweet clover grew abundantly where we pulled over and gathered the plants which were not populated with opalescent white butterflies.
On our way home, we drive part of the way down a private road where a place was for sale. We did not go all the way down this road. I would have like to; however, I was gifted to spot a large unripe walnut fruit dangling from its branch. I could imagine the bitter taste of its hull and its aromatic leaves that serve gentler digestive purposes than the walnut hull. Juglans major which resides in my high desert home is a new ally and tends well to belly woes.
New beginnings are present. Homesteading with Loba at Anima Canyon has rekindled the hearth of my heart.

Beginnings of a Homesteading Apprenticeship

This is a post I wrote when I first started visiting the Anima Center located in the Gila Wilderness. Water was cold when I traversed the 7 river crossings. And when I entered the warm wood stove kitchen hearth I could hear the water gurgling  a boil and Loba busy cutting up potatoes for stew. The windows were steamy and Rhiannon had grown since I last saw her. I chopped wood and wondered about the dormant seeds that would sprout up again in spring. For now, I mused by my own woodstove on loved wooden planks at the Gaia lodge, a womb of comfort for an awakening soul. I walked in the snow and traverse the ice cold river barefoot. My body awoke and my feet numbed as I gazed at the most marvelous ice crystals framing elk eaten willow shrubs...

2/2012

Winter homesteading requires that you pay attention to the ponderosa pine needle bed tucking in the forest floor seeds for their impermanent slumber. It also requires that I gently gaze at the flower china tea cup with the four legs at its base in plain soft sunlight. I notice its fragility and gold paint lining its periphery.

The ginger turned golden in the skillet.  And that gold tints our noses as we smell ginger steaming into the air.  Its scent wafting in the warm kitchen air makes me think about the longing for gold minerals in the wild heydays of the Southwest. Perhaps, I think about how the longing for gold minerals created an exasperation to become rich and prosperous. But right at this moment, the golden ginger scent is the prosperity.