Artemisia Absinthium

The world seems like it is always cracking these days. Little cracks creep and shatter the outer edges—slowly, sometimes suddenly. Sometimes it takes a minute to realize what has happened. A crow flies down and hovers over the mullein stalk, and everything stops for just a second. Shifts in perspective contort the leafless oak tree into a witches broom, a bent figure of a woman with a swollen belly and shoulders like old rotting furniture slumped in a dark room, staring out at me.

It would be nice to quiet my thoughts occasionally, but I am pretty sure that this insistent pressing—this endless droning, wandering, rising, falling—is just my brain having its way with me, so I try to embrace the noise. (Noise like a loud river, not noise like an airport.)

I am drinking wormwood tea for the third night in a row. There is something so comforting about this deep green bitterness, the way the taste echoes on my tongue even after the warm liquid has made its way down into my throat, and then into my stomach. It bites—Wormwood has a very strong fire, hidden at first, but revealing heat-fingers in strange ways after moments have passed—even as the bitterness fades, it bites again, warming my skin, flushing the space behind my ears. It is a feeling like a bee sting inside your body, hurting at first and then flooding with warm pain, making you wake up into the burning circle of skin that begins to beg to be scratched.

Wormwood has become a great comfort these past few days, and I am continually amazed at how much this plant has to offer. Layers and layers of personality—edges covered up by waves, sharpness embedded in softness—and what is starting to reveal itself as an incredibly complex dual nature. When I first started growing Wormwood, she seemed very feminine to me—Artemis embodied, essentially. (Not to mention the whole Green Fairy business—it is Artemisia Absinthium, after all.) Wild green woman roaming through the woods with a bow and arrow—hunter, sharp-witted, spirited, quick-footed. Virgin and yet dripping, seething with sex at the same time—taker of animal life, giver of green life. I made a habit of drinking wormwood tea on full-moons and watching her leaves turn a hundred shades of silver as the moon rose. She was soft—leaves begging to be held up to my lips, bitter porcupine quills hidden under the fur of the silverwort. Lately she has become a he... Grandfather wormwood, I suppose. Very intense, demanding wise old man.... Very much Mars. This Mars/Moon conflation is rather perplexing to me.... the male/female hybrid seems to be fairly common in plant life, but I have yet to understand whether the Mars/Moon aspect is two separate versions of the same sort of thing, or if they are at odds with each other in some way, or if they are actually complimentary below the surface. So, I'll just keep scratching into the surface and drinking Wormwood tea and see what happens....