Authenticity in my herbal practice as a neurospicy poet

Part two of two on Herbal Poetic path-making ~ building personal correspondences with plants beyond (human) language

Plants have taught me more about the art of flirtation and seduction than most of my lovers.

I love how skilled they are in the beyond-verbal channels of communication — a shivering shedding branch, a fallen flower on a forest trail path, tension in response to a tug, the way they visit us in dreams and can enter our lives through other people.

The early days of my herbal studies were saturated with virtual mentorship programs, late night library runs, tight scheduled interviews for my capstone, and simple remedy experimentation from my college dorm.

I remember the excitement of weaving my academic threads with my renewed love for folk magic and healing, which I share more about in the previous love letter.

I still find a lot of fulfillment in approaching herbalism from this lens of research. So much, in fact, that I’m going back to herbal school to refine my technical skills and receive my certification from Now and Then!

Over the next several months, I will be raising funds to cover my tuition costs. Your upgraded subscriptions, apothecary orders and direct donations allow me to continue doing what I love, which is writing/educating/medicine-making, while also training under highly respected herbalists to become even more adept at providing herbal healing for my communities!

When the plants begin courting…

Learning about plants in school-like settings is so fun. And, nothing compares to the juicy, sensual poetics of building relationships with plants in real time.

After I left D.C in 2022, I moved into a house that provided me the space to grow out a medicinal herb garden. Because up until then my practice had been very heady — research, learning from mentors in a virtual capacity, proving that plant medicine stories did indeed have a place in ethnographic writing, blah blah blah — I was eager to get my hands in the dirt. I moved back to San Diego to be closer to my family and give my nervous system a break after living in a busy (but tiny!) city. I was ready to return to my Saturn line, step into my Saturn return with openness, and begin a new healing cycle.

The first plants I introduced to my garden were what Alexis J. Cunningfolk would call my indispensable herbs. These were plants I was most excited to grow because I worked with them often, and in diverse ways. I was accustomed to buying these plants from bulk apothecaries, like my beloved Blue Nile in D.C, and now I would get to witness them in all their seasons!

Lemon Balm, Peppermint and Rosemary quickly entered the chat.

And soon, other friends who grew in my neighborhood began catching my attention….

Periwinkle, Evening Primrose, Calendula…

Pomegranate, Plumeria, Zinnia, Cosmos…

As I was growing out the herb garden of my dreams, I realized I was being courted by the plants themselves and I share more about this flirty unfolding in my Wisdom Eye zine!

Neurodivergence, poetry & intimacy in the pre-verbal realms

To this day, I am stunned to silence by how the plants invite us into their realm. Plant timing is different from human systems of measuring time, and yet it is still divine. Planty communication is etheric, embodied, and quite distinctly pre-(or perhaps post) verbal. They are the ultimate poets and lovers.

Devany ˚☽˚｡⋆𓃦 ˚☽˚｡⋆ fang girl talks at length about the connection between autistic people and highly sensitive attunement to plants and animals. Folks on the spectrum (and I can speak from personal experience) can be quite gifted in the realms beyond verbal communication. Much healing can be found in eco-intimacy and through connecting with plants as a form of divination and poetic reading-between-and-beyond-the-lines storytelling.

Around 2023-2024, I was becoming more comfortable with naming myself as neurodivergent, and poetry was an outlet for me to essentially tickle my brain and expand my capacity for holding many things at once. I was also sitting with the fact that I was now 4, almost 5, years out of undergrad and felt some pressure to go back to school for a graduate degree. A lot of my friends were completing their second degrees by this time, and I remember wanting to reframe this pressure as an invitation to niche the fuck up.

Where were my hyper-fixations guiding me? Where could I create my own curriculum to deep dive into the realms that beckoned me? Soon various poetry compilations, like the plants, began appearing on my path and inviting me to go deeper.

I remember how Danez Smith blew my mind with their sonnet sequences in Don’t Call Us Dead, how Mary Oliver dropped me into the micro/macrocosms and how Fatimah Asghar’s form-breaking genius inspired me to approach poetic storytelling with newfound innovation.

Contemporary poetry from BIPOC and queer writers revived my love for learning a new craft. In reading their stories, I was inspired to tell my own through personal mythmaking that invited the plants as important figures on my path. Plants as muses. Plants as guides, messages from deities, symbols and archetypes. Plants as their own essence beyond metaphor — as friends, relatives, lovers, companions!

Poetry as herbal channeling

In 2025, I began crafting Materia Poetica: odes to medicinal plants that interweave their healing properties with personal stories. This style of poetry helped me to expand upon my own understanding of healing herbs, beyond the flattening of their essence that often happens with scientific approaches and Materia Medica.

With all things, I find that balance and temperance are healthy (and needed). As herbalists, there is much we can learn from Materia Medica like contraindications to ensure the folks we service won’t experience adverse effects in working with our suggested herbal allies, as well as a general knowledge of how plants can have dualistic (and seemingly contradictory) actions depending on how they’re prepared. I find that my herbal poetic path is nourished by approaching Materia Medica from an open-minded and creative perspective that honors their research-based wisdom in tandem with my embodied experiences.

Many of my Materia Poetica make their way into the Creations by Florea apothecary, with channeled poetic pieces accompanying remedies like the Ouroboros elixir for anxiety and revolutionary shapeshifting and the nourishing Gaia’s Love herbal tea.

I see these channeled poems as a bridge between the embodied experience of connecting with plants (which is deeply pre-verbal to me) and the beautiful way that humans make sense of the world through spoken and written word.

Poetry, for me, is an essence-making process… Poems are not the words themselves but what the words transmit… Poetry is not the scientific report purporting how aromatic plants impact the vague nerve, but the slow exhaling shoulder-drop after a deep huff of Lavender.”

— Dominique Mattis, Articulating the Undercurrent (Poetry as Spellcasting)

Handwritten graphic titled Herbal Poetic Cycles, in a cycle from left to right beginning at the top with:

expressing a healing need by broadcasting your intentions → plants stepping forward as available guides, healers & teachers (some you may have overlooked!) → answering the call & deepening the relationship through ritual (art, prayer, remedies) → embodying their medicine over time & letting the lessons come through in diverse ways that may include the written/spoken word → accessing another dimension of selfhood & being in relationship → back to beginning.

Glancing back, looking ahead

As 2025 comes to a close, I’m reflecting on the herbal poetic portals I brought to San Diego (and beyond) this year.

This is the first year that I’ve consistently offered my herbal education and poetry circles in-person; much of my work up until now has been through apothecary remedies and my virtual BIPOC writing circle.

In 2025, I birthed these gentle landing spaces for folks to learn simple herbal recipes, meditate outdoors, read BIPOC-authored ecopoetry and begin crafting their own Materia Poetica. Here’s to celebrating big wins!

• Herbal Workshop Series with Abriendo Caminos, San Diego

• Dreaming our Descendants for National Wildlife Federation, virtual

• Plant Kin Poetics: Rituals & Remedies, Outside the Lens’ Land + Lenses programming, San Diego

• A Soft Space with Spiritual Wellfare LLC, San Diego

• Writing as Resistance Poetry Panel, Lambda Archives, San Diego

• Poetic Herbalism, San Diego

• Ecopoetry Sip & Write, San Diego

• Creative Altar Building, Ministry of Neteru, virtual

• Queer Poetics Collective, virtual

I’m ready to conjure up more spaces for communing with plant spirits next year <3 I foresee many more portals and opportunities to let the plants speak for themselves, and holding space for folks to arrive at the medicine that is most needed for their path.

I’ll see you in a love letter real soon, and until then, be well!

⋆˙⊹ ࿐ *ੈ✩ ₊

The Dream Seeding Studio weaves herbalism and poetry with hands-on workshops, BIPOC virtual writing circles and small batch herbal remedies. The Studio is nurtured by Shel, a Black/Chinese/non-binary herbalist and poet, chaos gardening their way into remembering on Kumeyaay Land (San Diego).