Instead of composting all the herbs, twigs, and stems from your brews, you can store them in a burlap or muslin sack and allow them to dry. Keep stuffing in twigs of lavender, rosemary, mint, and all the leftover aromatic plant material until you have a big bag. On some special evening, burn it in your fireplace or an outdoor bonfire, and it will be like a gigantic incense burner with the lovely scents wafting from the flames. And the best part? It’s 100 percent free!
After the September Equinox signals the change of seasons to fall, you should start making pots of this seasonal meal, which is a guaranteed crowd pleaser. This autumnal soup is just as pleasing to the cook as it can be a quick supper, leftovers for lunch, and easily frozen for meals on the go. It is simple and simply delicious. On the eve of the first full moon of fall, gather the ingredients and prepare this nourishing lunar tonic. Refrigerate overnight, and the flavors will “marry” together to intensify and become an even more savory supper to serve to loved ones on a Harvest Moon night.
In a large iron skillet (preferably one well-seasoned by use in your kitchen), fry the leeks in the olive oil until they become soft and translucent. Add in the chopped garlic until it is also soft and is wafting a wonderful scent into your kitchen. Transfer to a soup pot, oil and all, and add the water, heating to a boil. Add all the remaining veggies, the garlic, and the herbs, then turn the heat down to a simmer for forty-five minutes. Test the taters to see if they are soft enough by mashing a couple with a wooden spoon. If they are still a bit hard, simmer for another five minutes. Turn the heat down to very low and then season with salt and pepper to taste. Add the celery salt as the last element of the year’s abundance.
Did you know your pantry is like a pharmacy? Thankfully, it is far cheaper. Cumin is loaded with phytochemicals, antioxidants, iron, copper, calcium, potassium, manganese, selenium, zinc, and magnesium and contains high amounts of B-complex nutrients. Cumin also helps with insomnia. Cinnamon is truly a power spice. Just half a teaspoon daily can dramatically reduce blood glucose levels in those with type 2 diabetes and lower cholesterol. Cayenne promotes circulation and boosts metabolism. Clove is an antifungal and abets toothaches. Nutrient-rich parsley is a detoxifying herb and acts as an anti-inflammatory and antispasmodic as well as helping conditions from colic to indigestion. Rub it on itchy skin for instant relief! Sage is very beneficial in treating gum and throat infections. Sage tea has helped ease depression and anxiety for generations. Thyme is a cure for a hangover and doubles as a remedy for colds and bronchitis. Cilantro is a good source of iron, magnesium, phytonutrients, and flavonoids and is also high in dietary fiber. Cilantro has been used for thousands of years as a digestive and helps to lower blood sugar when it is too high, possibly as a result of stimulating insulin secretion or enzyme production. Ginger stimulates circulation and is an excellent digestive as it aids in absorption of food and clears bloating due to indigestion. Immune champion turmeric boosts production of antioxidants and reduction of inflammation. Blue Zone centenarians credit their long, healthy lives to drinking turmeric root tea daily. Pack your pantry with these seasonings for optimal health and happiness.
I also had the great good fortune to have grown up in the countryside on a farm. Much of what I know I learned from my wise aunt: what herbs to gather in the wild and which foods to cook for love, money, luck, health, and in celebration of the high holidays. It is exciting to go to the garden, the grocery store, or the farmer’s market and bring home the ingredients for positive life change. In addition to the secrets of magical cooking, I learned from this wise woman that the first task to “undertake is to clean your kitchen and purify it. If anything needs repairing, fix it. Any utensils, pots, or pans that are banged up can also be donated (so long as you can afford to immediately purchase replacements). If your kitchen curtains look shabby to your eye, make or buy new ones. If there is a bag of rice or beans past its prime, compost away. You should both clean the cooking space in the practical sense as well as cleanse it in the magical sense. Prepare your kitchen to be used for the purpose of healing.
Compost tea is a marvelous way to feed your plants and give them extra nutrients in a wholly natural way that is free of chemicals. You want to feed your friends and family only the cleanest and pesticide-free produce, so start out organic and you will have a “garden that produces healthy food. You will need a big bucket and the following to make compost tea:
Add the water and the soil to a gallon bucket, and keep it in a place out of direct heat or cold. I use my outdoor shed, but a garage will also do nicely. Let your compost tea “brew” for a week, and give it a stir every other day. Watering cans are the perfect teapot for your garden. Strain out the dirt and pour the liquid into your watering can, where it will then be ready to serve up some serious nutrients to your garden.'
Comfrey is beloved by healers and is one of the best-known healing herbs of all times. It has even been referred to as “a one-herb pharmacy” for its inherent curative powers. Well-known to and widely used by the early Greeks and Romans, its very name, symphytum, from the Greek symphyo, means to “make grow together,” referring to its traditional use of healing fractures. Comfrey relieves pain and inflammation, and comfrey salve will be a mainstay of your home first aid kit. Use it on cuts, scrapes, rashes, sunburn, and almost any skin irritation. Comfrey salve can also bring comfort to aching arthritic joints and sore muscles.
One of Mother Nature’s most effective healers is aloe. When I lived in colder areas with frost and snow, I grew aloe in a wide pot with good drainage and placed it in the sunniest spot in the kitchen, where it thrived with very little water. I am truly fortunate to live where it never gets below freezing, so I have a towering aloe in the left garden corner that is growing to tree-like proportions. When anyone in the household gets a burn, a bug bite, a rash, a scratch, an itch, or a sunburn, I march back and grab a piece, slice parallel with its flat side, and apply the juice liberally. We use it as a medicine as well as a beauty application for facials, hair gel, and skin massage and feel so blessed that all this heavenly healing is utterly free of cost. Aloe propagates through baby plants sprouting off the sides; you can repot the “babies” into little clay containers and give them as gifts to your circle to share the healing energy as well as protection and luck.
Loving, giving, and so dramatic, Leos leave nothing behind as they live life full tilt. This can be emotionally exhausting and may also lead to many a heartbreak. When this happens, anyone, but especially Leos, will benefit from borage flower essence, which offers encouragement and can move you from sad and hurt to healing and openhearted.
This faithful flower’s name is derived from the Anglo-Saxon daeges eage, “day’s eye,” since it closes in the evening. The daisy has been used in one of the oldest of love charms. To know if your true love will return, take a daisy and intone, “He loves me, he loves me not” until the last petal is plucked, and the answer will be revealed. This flower is not just a boon for romance, however; it also useful in herbal medicine for aches, bruises, wounds, inflammation, and soothing eye baths. As a flower remedy, it is quite helpful with exhaustion and is a highly regarded remedy in homeopathy. Echinacea, also known as purple coneflower, is a member of the daisy family that has become wildly popular as a healer for colds and as a powerful immune booster; it both increases your T cell count and helps to fight off illnesses both minor and major. Echinacea is an herb of abundance “that attracts abundant prosperity, but it can also be used in magic workings to amplify the power.
Allium, also known as chives, is blessedly easy plant to grow anywhere and everywhere—on the kitchen windowsill or in the garden patch. A member of the onion family, this is a lovely case where the entire plant—bulb, leaves, and flowers—can be eaten. Plant the bulbs six inches apart, water them, and you can pretty much ignore them after that as all they require is water. A plus is that this relative of onion has insect repellent properties, so you can plant rows of this beside veggies and fruits and the bugs will stay away. They propagate quickly, so you can dig up mature bulbs, separate them, and replant them. One tip to remember is that chives do lose their flavor when dried, so use them fresh. The flowers are a lovely surprise to add to salads for their edible beauty, and many a kitchen gardener uses chives in all manner of dishes as it is good for weight management and is a plant of protection for both home and garden. Chives were used by healers of old in amulets to ward off evil spirits and mischievous fairy folk. Fresh cut bunches were also hung beside the sickbed to speed healing, especially for children. If you see a home surrounded by rows of allium, you know they hold to the “old ways.
Atacamite is a rare green crystal from the Southern Hemisphere, specifically Australia, Chile, and Central America. As with other uncommon crystals, atacamite is only now being understood for its healing powers and is thought to be of great help to the genitals, thyroid gland, and nerves. Legend has it that it helps with “Venus diseases”—herpes and other STDs.
This gray or dark brown stone is also known as lodestone, a poetic name I much prefer. It has a major quantity of iron and is, as the name implies, very magnetic. The ancients called it lodestone, although Plato himself wrote that it was the “heraclean stone.” All iron-based crystals are considered to be very helpful to the blood and circulatory system. Magnet therapy has come into vogue in the last twenty years and is becoming pretty commonplace nowadays. Even athletes and physicians are trying magnetic therapy, and any controversy about this onetime New Age healing method is fading thanks to the many positive endorsements.
I can’t help but marvel that I’m writing about jade on Chinese New Year. Jade is held in the highest regard by the Chinese and has been for thousands of years, thought to bring good luck and prosperity. Jade is a harbinger of purity and tranquility. The Chinese so adore this tone that they carry little talismanic pieces with them everywhere they go. Other cultures—the Maori of New Zealand and the Japanese—also hold jade blessed. Jade is a soft stone, perfect for carving. Both the Chinese and Japanese decorated royal personages with exquisite jade jewelry. Jade comes from Myanmar, Russia, Italy, China, and North and Central America. It is so affordable, I urge you to explore all the magical colors—yellow, orange, blue, red, purple, white, brown, and classic jade green—and powers of positivity.
Jade brings with it the power of love and protection. It is also a dream stone, promoting prophetic and deeply meaningful dreams.
Jadeite and nephrite are two varieties of jade, with the far more translucent and rarer jadeite being the more popular. Their healing properties are very much the same, however, and the different colors manifest different curatives. All jade brings positive energy. In 2001, a 2,000 ton boulder of jade was discovered in Ptiakant in Myanmar—now that’s a whole lot of love!
I love that the word “garnet” comes from granatum, referring to the color of a pomegranate seed—how mythic and romantic! (And much more appealing than the word coined by the Egyptians, “carbuncle.”) Garnet has come to be considered a wine-colored stone, but in actuality, it can come in green, yellow, or brown. Garnets are found all over the world and can make up a family of minerals:
Red garnets are love stones. These sexy stones can help those with a lethargic libido tune into their passion. Green garnets are the real healing stones. These crystals offer protection to the chakras. You should wear green garnets as earrings or in a necklace to get the most benefit from the inner and outer healing power.
Garnets are conductors of past-life memories and are memory sharpeners in the here and now. They offer the welcome advantage of increasing patience. Garnets also promote compassion and awareness of the world and the self. They help a person let go, especially of self-loathing.
Flint is probably not thought of as a crystal, let alone as a healing crystal, but it is a variety of quartz whose crystal structure is not visible to the eye. Flint most commonly occurs in the form of rounded nodules in a grayish black color. If it is found near chalk, it will have a white coating. Flint can also be red or brown in color, and it is found all over the world.
Early humans in the Stone Age cultures of the Pleistocene era appreciated the hardness of this practical crystal, and they used it to make crude tools and spearheads. More-modern men used flint to set off the gunpowder in flintlock guns. It is unfortunate that flint came to be so relied upon for weapons, as its energy can actually be very beneficial to the tissue of the human body. Flint gives an allover sense of well-being, not just in the body but also in the mind. The special gift flint gives is a renewed sense of strength and gentle healing power to those suffering from degenerative diseases. Flint in your home will ground you and create a sense of safety and comfort.
Abalone is the beautifully iridescent lining of a seashell—a product of our oceans and the end result of a living thing. Abalone is fished in California and in the warm, tropical coastal waters of Japan, China, and South America. Abalone is used to heal the heart and the muscles tissue, and to aid digestion. Use abalone as a dish to hold your sage smudging-stick for clearing energy at home. This gorgeous organic gem is a beautiful and sacred token for your altar or shrine at home. Just looking at abalone gives a sense of inner peace.
Peridot is one of the most misunderstood gems on the planet. It is really a combination of two other stones, fayalite and forsterite, with a bit of iron, a dash of nickel and a pinch of chromium. The world’s oldest source of the green charmer was the mist-shrouded desert island of Zeberget, also called Saint John’s Island, off Egypt’s coast. Unfortunately for the peridot miners, this island was a pit of deadly, venomous snakes! The pharaohs so treasured their peridot that any uninvited visitors to the island were put to death. Nowadays, the only residents of Zerberget are a few turtles and some seabirds. Perhaps the stones from the breastplate of Solomon and his high priest, Aaron, came from this odd little island. Peridot was one of the twelve stones believed to have the power to create miracles for the rituals of these priests and to help protect them in battle. Furthermore, Solomon drank soma (an intoxicating plant juice) from cups carved from peridot, thus gaining his wealth of wisdom.
Now that the mines on Zeberget are no more, most peridot is mined by Native Americans in Arizona and in the exotic locales of Myanmar, Sri Lanka, and the Kashmir Himalayas. Peridot has also been found in some meteorites. In the 1920s, a farmer in Kansas awoke one day to find lumps of peridot-studded meteorite in his fields. Maybe you really have to follow the peridot road to get to Oz!
It is believed that Cleopatra, queen of the Nile, adorned herself with high-quality peridots instead of emeralds. The Romans called peridot the evening emerald. This stone, brought back as booty by the Knights Templar and Crusaders, was used to adorn cathedrals in medieval times. One the Shrine of the Magi in Germany’s Cologne Cathedral, there is a huge 200-carat peridot.
The powers of peridot are believed to be twice as intense if it is set in gold. Peridot was thought to have the power to drive away evil, and if you are so lucky as to have a goblet carved out of peridot, any medicine you might drink out of it will have magical healing powers. In Hawaii, the lore of this gem is that the goddess Pele cried tears that turned into peridots.
Pearls have a romantic past. The Chinese regarded them as the physical manifestation of the souls of oysters. One of the prettier names given to the pearl was margarithe, meaning “child of light.” The Arabs called them tears of the gods and said they were formed when raindrops fell into oyster shells. In India, pearls were the perfect wedding gift, promising devotion and fertility. A Hindu wedding ritual involved the piercing of the perfect pearl, a virginity ceremony.
One less-than-successful cure for the plague was this ancient recipe: six grains of powdered pearl in water mixed with ash-tree sap. One remedy for excessive bleeding was a glass of water with one part burned pearl-powder. Snuffing the same was a treatment for headaches. Pearl oil was used for nervous conditions, and pearl poultice was even used for leprosy! Other less glamorous uses for pearl potions were treatments for hemorrhoids and poisoning. An elixir made with one-half a pearl grain was supposed to cure impotence and be an overall aphrodisiac. In bygone days, people were so fond of grinding up pearls that they even used them in toothpaste!
