On reverence.

This fall on one brilliantly sunny day that was both the day before a full moon and the first frost of the year, I dug up the echinacea roots. Diligently I divided them into larger root crowns and smaller root crowns. I pulled the twisted woody roots apart, washed gently in between. I separated and scrubbed, chopped them small, doing my best to make them even. It took me hours to clean and prep them. Three perhaps. More if you include the harvesting and replanting of the smaller crowns.

Echinacea roots need three years of growth before you harvest them, so these plants were seeded in the spring of 2021. I was, it feels like, an entirely different human in the spring of 2021.

Once chopped the roots were tucked into a jam jar. Just one. Because after three years of growth there were only enough roots to fill one 500ml mason jar. Once topped with alcohol, it made just over one cup of tincture.

Three years of growing.
Three hours of prepping.
Three hundred millilitres of medicine.

It humbled me. This precious but tiny harvest.

It is softer and sweeter than any other echinacea I have had. High levels of inulin give it a milky gentleness. You can taste the many different pollinators who tend this land, who came to rest over and over again on the spiny orange centres of these spectacular flowers. There is a scent that reminds me of the soil here at sunrise. And it is all I have, 300ml, to last me for the next two years, before I can make another batch of homegrown echinacea tincture.

I will not hoard it. Medicine is there to be used when needed. But I will savour it. I will give gratitude for it. I will revere it. The multiplicity of layers and interconnectedness in this one bottle is astounding.

We need more of such reverence.