Over the many years I have been an herbalist (about fourteen, as far as I can figure) people have asked me how it was I found this path. There are many answers: there were many seeds, many influences that came to me, and over the years, began to sprout, set root and prosper. Here is the story of one of those key seeds.Around 1990, I developed a passion to learn about butterflies. I did some research, found some good local books, all written by our amazing local lepidopterist Bob Pyle. With a little more digging, I found out he was teaching one of his only workshops that year, at Chinook Learning Center on Whidbey Island. This workshop was many months away; I promptly signed up, and held my soul in patience (mostly impatience) waiting for the weekend to come.
So finally one sunny Friday morning in June, full of excitement and enthusiasm, I drove up to Chinook. The workshop began at noon; I settled in a comfortable chair and listened, enthralled, as Bob began to speak his magic about butterflies.
Unfortunately, in the middle of his introductory workshop, I developed the ominous signs of one of my frequent, debilitating migraines. These were monthly events; despite explorations into all kinds of medications, I had learned that the only sure cure was to go and hide out in dark room, stick my head under a pillow and wait 18 hours for the pain to pass.
I was heartsick. Here I had this rare opportunity to sit with one of the foremost naturalists of our time, and I would be too incapacitated to enjoy it. Depressed and morose, I retreated outside to the garden at Chinook to consider my options.
Chinook was and is a remarkable piece of land, a place of mystery, beauty and magic. The gardens had been planted with a fine mix of herbs and other plants to attract pollinators. I wandered around briefly and finally flung myself on the edge of a bench. Flowers were planted quite close to where I was sitting, including a tall shrub of pink Flox. I glanced at it briefly and retreated back into my bad mood, and back into the pain of the migraine, which was rapidly progressing.
As I sat there, a remarkable thing occurred. I heard the pink Phlox speak to me: "Smell me". This was long before my days as a woo-woo healer, and this event was both spooky and unprecedented. I did my best to ignore the flower, and put the experience down to a weird auditory hallucination triggered by the migraine. But the Phlox did not give up; it actually leaned closer to me and said again: "Smell me". Rattled, sure I was losing my mind, I leaned over and stuck my nose in the flower, taking a deep breath of its beautiful pink carnation-like smell.
With that, the Phlox backed off and I returned to ordinary reality, not sure what had just happened. And as I sat on the bench over the next hour, I started to notice: my migraine was clearing. I couldn't believe it - that never happened with my migraines. As that Friday afternoon wore on, my migraine went away. I returned to the workshop; I tramped in the woods with Bob and his students, I saw many beautiful butterflies, and even had a hands on experience with a Satyr Anglewing. It was a wonderful workshop, and it started me down a long and rewarding relationship with butterflies.
But I never forgot about the gift from the Phlox. It taught me that there was much more to the world of healing that ever I learned in my physician assistant training. And so it was, a few years later, the seed it gave me sprouted, and I started down the path of the herbalist.
Janet
Resources: Satyr Anglewing butterfly photo from Stockphoto
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