Beebalm Oracle Card

.::Beebalm::.

Visionary

“I contain multitudes.” -Walt Whitman

I am in middle school and my family is on a trip up North. We’ve rented a midnight launch to fish Mille Lacs, and I do not want to go. I worry about the fish, about watching them suffocate while people cheer. But my mom tells me it is part of life and I must go. Though it is July, it is cold on the water. We hobble onto the boat with our gear and extra clothes, and the owner of the cabin drives us, loud and slow, out to the middle of the lake. It takes forty-five minutes to arrive. Folks in our group catch walleye almost immediately. Each time I hear the frantic reeling of a rod, my stomach lurches.

Our captain is a slender man who looks older than my dad, missing teeth, in a stained yellow t-shirt under a flannel button-down. He smokes endlessly, and is patient with the bait. My brother catches a fish too small to keep; my mom catches one far too big. I sit near the back, watching the water, willing the fish to swim lower. Then the motor sticks. It will only troll, and it will only turn one way. We circle for half an hour before the captain kills the engine, strips off his flannel, and jumps into the black water to fix it. I lie back on the bench and stare up. Pinks and purples are moving across the sky, sheer enough that the stars burn through. “The Northern Lights,” my mom says. Everyone aboard watches the sky dance while the man in the water cusses and pounds on the engine, and I wonder if I will drown looking at the most beautiful sky I have ever seen.

Bee Balm, Monarda, is a wonder plant. They grow unapologetically, running rhizomes just beneath the skin of the soil, so that what looks like a single stem is always a weave, one body rising in many threads. Their medicine is a fierce warmth that pierces stagnation: hot, dry, dispersing, the ally for what has gone boggy and stuck in the chest, the gut, the spirit. Monarda’s flowers sit like ragged crowns upon square, straw-hollow stems, purple in the prairie and scarlet along wet woodland edges, each crown a whorl of small tubular flowers, each tube shaped exactly for a long tongue. Hummingbird, hawkmoth, bumblebee: Monarda is a community plant, full of reciprocity, giving generously and asking only to be visited. Their smell is thyme and oregano and something wilder, a scent that clears the head the moment it’s crushed between the fingers. Find Monarda when the pieces of yourself, or your view of a situation, have become fractured and scattered, when you have grown cold and dense around an old wound, when you have forgotten that you are many and connected underground. Monarda tells us that we grow from ground and rise to air, that we can be rooted and still unfurl into scent and color and divinity, that we can be fierce and still step lightly on the soil. Their counsel is not to force the fracture closed but to warm it, move it, let breath and blood return until the scattered threads remember they were always one weave.

I would love to hear more about your relationship to plants and the web of interbeing. Please consider a public comment on this post. When we all share, we all build more connection to the natural world, our Mother and our home.

Stay wild and true

~Emily