StephanieBacquetMathews

Author: Stephanie Bacquet Mathews

  • Celestial Sanctuary 2- Perspective is Everything

    12.858° – 25.715° Ecliptic Longitude

    Mirach

    OCTOBER 8 – OCTOBER 21, 2026

    This sanctuary holds two objects: a red giant star 197 light-years away in the last phase of its stellar life, and a dwarf galaxy 10 million light-years away that absorbed a smaller galaxy approximately 900 million years ago and has been structurally altered by that event ever since. The galaxy sits 7 arc-minutes from the star. It is so close in apparent position that the star’s glare makes the galaxy almost impossible to observe without significant magnification. They have no physical relationship. They share only this line of sight from Earth, and this 13-day window of sky.

    MIRACH · THE FOCAL STAR

    BETA ANDROMEDAE · SEMIREGULAR VARIABLE · ASYMPTOTIC GIANT BRANCH

    RA 01h 09m 43.91s Dec +35° 37′ 14″ ~197 light-years Magnitude 2.01–2.10 (variable) Spectral Type M0 III Mass 2.49 solar masses Radius 86 solar radiiLuminosity 1,675 solar luminosities Temperature 3,762 K

    Mirach is a red giant in the final evolutionary phase available to a star of its mass. The asymptotic giant branch, a stage that follows the horizontal branch and represents the last sustained period of nuclear burning before a star of low to intermediate mass sheds its outer layers entirely and ends its life as a white dwarf. On the asymptotic giant branch, the star is no longer fusing helium steadily in its core. The core has become an inert ball of carbon and oxygen, surrounded by two thin shells, an inner shell fusing helium, and an outer shell fusing hydrogen, each burning on different timescales, producing an unstable layered energy output that drives the star’s outer envelope to enormous size.

    ASYMPTOTIC GIANT BRANCH

    The second major expansion phase in the life of a low-to-intermediate mass star. After the horizontal branch phase, during which helium fuses steadily in the core, the helium core becomes inert and the star expands again, this time driven by two concentric burning shells of hydrogen and helium surrounding the carbon-oxygen core. The star reaches its largest size and highest luminosity during this phase. It is also during this phase that a star loses the most mass, building a circumstellar envelope of expelled gas and dust that will eventually glow as a planetary nebula after the core is exposed.

    Mirach has expanded to 86 times the radius of our Sun. Its effective surface temperature has dropped to 3,762 Kelvin, less than two-thirds the Sun’s surface temperature, giving it the deep red-orange color characteristic of M-class giant stars. Despite its cool surface, its luminosity reaches approximately 1,675 times that of the Sun because its surface area is so vast. It is a semiregular variable star, shifting between apparent magnitude 2.01 and 2.10 with no strictly fixed period. Which means the variability is driven by internal pulsations as the hydrogen and helium shells burn unevenly, causing the star’s outer layers to expand and contract on irregular timescales ranging from 30 to 100 days.

    SEMIREGULAR VARIABLE STAR

    A pulsating giant or supergiant star that shows periodic brightness variations but with some irregularity, which the cycle is roughly repeating but not strictly metronomic. In asymptotic giant branch stars, the semiregular pulsation is driven by the interaction of the hydrogen and helium burning shells, which periodically undergo thermal pulses. These are brief episodes of dramatically increased helium shell burning. In turn they alter the star’s radius, luminosity, and outflow of mass. These variations are superimposed on a slower, longer-term change in the star’s overall structure.

    Mirach is actively shedding mass through a slow, cool stellar wind. Which is a continuous outflow of gas from the star’s outer layers being pushed away by radiation pressure and pulsation-driven shocks. This mass loss is the defining characteristic of the asymptotic giant branch phase: over thousands of years it accumulates into a circumstellar envelope, a growing sphere of gas and dust surrounding the star at increasing distance. When the expelled material becomes thick enough to be energized by the increasingly hot stellar core being exposed beneath it, this envelope will glow as a planetary nebula, a short-lived, visually spectacular shell of ionized gas expanding into space. The stellar core left behind after the envelope disperses will cool slowly over billions of years as a white dwarf.

    CIRCUMSTELLAR ENVELOPE

    A shell of gas and dust expelled from a star’s outer layers over time, surrounding the star at increasing distances as the outflow continues. In asymptotic giant branch stars, the envelope grows as the star’s mass-loss rate increases over the course of its evolution. The envelope is cooler than the star itself and can allow the formation of dust grains and molecules. Eventually the envelope becomes a planetary nebula when the remaining stellar core heats to temperatures sufficient to ionize the surrounding gas.

    PLANETARY NEBULA

    A glowing shell of gas expelled by a dying low-to-intermediate mass star during the final stages of its asymptotic giant branch evolution. The name is historical, as early astronomers thought the round, glowing objects resembled planetary disks through small telescopes, and has nothing to do with planets. A planetary nebula forms when the expelled outer envelope is ionized by ultraviolet radiation from the hot stellar core left behind. It expands outward at speeds of 10–30 kilometers per second and disperses into the surrounding interstellar medium over tens of thousands of years.

    With a mass of 2.49 solar masses, Mirach does not have enough mass to undergo core collapse at the end of its evolution. It will not become a neutron star or produce a supernova. Instead, the full sequence of its end is already determined: the remaining mass-loss phase, the planetary nebula, the white dwarf cooling track. The timescale for the current phase is estimated in the tens of thousands of years.

    Mirach appears in Babylonian star catalogs, making it one of the stars with the longest continuous record of human observation. In Arabic astronomical tradition it was designated the standard dark-red reference star, the color anchor used as a comparison point against which Antares was identified as the standard bright red. The name Mirach derives from the Arabic al-mi’zar, meaning the girdle or loincloth, referring to its position in classical sky maps. It has also been called Cingulum and Ventrale in different traditions, each name referencing the same positional attribute.

    Mirach is not on the ecliptic, it sits at declination +35° 37′, well north of the ecliptic plane and is not subject to lunar occultations. It reaches its highest point in the October night sky, transiting the meridian in the late evening hours during this sanctuary window.

    NGC 404 · MIRACH’S GHOST

    DWARF LENTICULAR GALAXY · THE MOST ISOLATED GALAXY IN THE LOCAL UNIVERSE · MOVING TOWARD US

    RA 01h 09m 27.0s Dec +35° 43′ 04″ 10 million light-years Magnitude 11.2 Diameter 22,000 light-years Type SA(s)0− Discovered September 13, 1784 7 arc-minutes from Mirach

    William Herschel discovered NGC 404 on September 13, 1784, using his 18.7-inch reflector telescope. He catalogued it as II 224. At only 7 arc-minutes from the second-magnitude star Mirach, the galaxy sits so close to the star’s glare in apparent position that it is nearly impossible to observe without deliberately blocking Mirach’s light or using high magnification to increase contrast and apparent separation. This proximity earned it the nickname Mirach’s Ghost. A galaxy hiding in the light of a star it has nothing to do with, visible only when the observer looks carefully past the obvious.

    NGC 404 is a dwarf lenticular galaxy, smaller than a typical spiral galaxy, lacking spiral arms, with the disk shape of a spiral but the smooth, featureless structure more common to elliptical galaxies. It is approximately 22,000 light-years in diameter, compared to the Milky Way’s roughly 100,000 light-years. Its apparent magnitude of 11.2 makes it accessible through small telescopes but invisible to the naked eye, and its low surface brightness, the light is spread across a relatively large apparent area, makes it more challenging than its magnitude alone suggests.

    LENTICULAR GALAXY

    A galaxy type intermediate between elliptical and spiral galaxies. Lenticular galaxies have a central bulge and a disk, like a spiral galaxy, but lack the spiral arm structure and contain little gas and dust for ongoing star formation. They are thought to be former spiral galaxies that have been stripped of their interstellar material, either through interaction with another galaxy, ram-pressure stripping as they move through a galaxy cluster’s hot gas, or simply through exhausting their star-forming fuel over time. NGC 404 is unusual among lenticulars because it retains significant neutral hydrogen, evidence of a more complex history than a simple gradual depletion.

    NGC 404 is one of the most isolated galaxies in the known universe. Its nearest neighboring galaxy lies at least 3.6 million light-years away. It sits just outside the gravitational boundary of the Local Group, which is the collection of galaxies our Milky Way belongs to, and appears not to be gravitationally bound to any larger structure. It is gravitationally independent, orbiting no larger galaxy, embedded in no cluster, surrounded by an unusually empty volume of space.

    LOCAL GROUP

    The gravitationally bound collection of roughly 80 galaxies in our immediate cosmic neighborhood, spanning approximately 10 million light-years. The three largest members are the Milky Way, the Andromeda Galaxy, and the Triangulum Galaxy. NGC 404 lies just beyond the Local Group’s outer boundary, close enough to appear in the same region of sky as Local Group members, but not gravitationally bound to it. It exists in the relative void between the Local Group and the next significant galaxy concentration.

    NGC 404 is one of very few galaxies in the observable universe that shows a blueshift rather than a redshift. It is moving toward us, not away from us. The vast majority of galaxies are receding as the universe expands; NGC 404’s approach velocity of 48 kilometers per second is a local gravitational effect rather than a cosmic expansion signal, but it remains an observational distinction almost no other galaxy shares.

    BLUESHIFT

    A shift of a galaxy’s spectral lines toward shorter, bluer wavelengths, indicating the galaxy is moving toward the observer. The opposite of redshift, which indicates recession. In an expanding universe almost all galaxies are redshifted, moving away from every other galaxy as space itself expands. The handful of galaxies that show blueshift are close enough to our Local Group that their individual gravitational motions toward us temporarily override the overall expansion. NGC 404’s blueshift means it is currently approaching the Milky Way at 48 kilometers per second.

    The most significant physical feature of NGC 404 is what surrounds it: two large concentric rings of neutral hydrogen. Raw atomic hydrogen gas that has not been ionized by stellar radiation is extending well beyond the galaxy’s visible stellar disk. This is highly unusual for a lenticular galaxy. Early-type galaxies like lenticulars typically contain little neutral hydrogen, having exhausted or expelled their gas reserves over billions of years. The presence of these rings in NGC 404 is understood as the structural consequence of a galactic merger.

    NEUTRAL HYDROGEN (H I)

    Atomic hydrogen gas in which the electron has not been stripped away by radiation, it remains bound to the proton. Neutral hydrogen is the raw material from which stars eventually form when it is compressed sufficiently by gravity. It is detected in radio astronomy through its characteristic emission at a wavelength of 21 centimeters. The distribution of neutral hydrogen in and around a galaxy traces the history of that galaxy’s gas supply, where it came from, how it moves, and whether external material has been added through mergers or accretion.

    Approximately 900 million years ago, NGC 404 collided with and absorbed a smaller neighboring galaxy. The neutral hydrogen in those rings is understood to be material acquired from that absorbed galaxy. Making the structural remnant of a smaller system that no longer exists independently. Radio telescope observations with the Very Large Array mapped the hydrogen rings and dated the collision. When the infalling hydrogen settled into the plane of NGC 404’s disk, it triggered a wave of new star formation. In particular in the outermost regions where the rings are concentrated. This star formation has been ongoing at a low level since the merger, unusual for a galaxy of this type. The galaxy’s disk now contains stars of dramatically different ages: the inner regions are dominated by old stellar populations more than 5 billion years old, while the nuclear cluster at the center shows a burst of star formation approximately 1 billion years ago, coinciding with the proposed timing of the merger, and the ring regions contain young stars that formed from the acquired hydrogen.

    At the center of NGC 404 sits a nuclear star cluster approximately 100 light-years in diameter, which has an unusually dense, compact concentration of stars at the galaxy’s core. Within or alongside this cluster there is evidence for a probable intermediate-mass black hole of several tens of thousands of solar masses. The evidence comes from the galaxy’s LINER spectrum: a low-ionization nuclear emission-line region. This is a type of emission pattern in the central light of a galaxy associated with a weakly active galactic nucleus, consistent with a black hole accreting material at a low rate. Dynamical modeling of stellar and gas motions near the center supports but does not yet conclusively confirm the black hole’s presence.

    NUCLEAR STAR CLUSTER

    An extremely dense cluster of stars located at the precise center of a galaxy, found in many galaxies that do not host a supermassive black hole, and in some that do. Nuclear star clusters are among the densest stellar environments known, with millions of stars packed into a region only tens to hundreds of light-years across. They form through a combination of in-situ star formation triggered by gas flowing toward the galactic center, and the inspiral of globular clusters dragged inward by gravitational friction. NGC 404’s nuclear cluster shows a starburst approximately 1 billion years old embedded in an older stellar population, consistent with the proposed merger event.

    INTERMEDIATE-MASS BLACK HOLE

    A black hole with a mass between roughly a few hundred and a few hundred thousand times that of the Sun, larger than the stellar-mass black holes formed by individual supernova explosions, smaller than the supermassive black holes found at the centers of large galaxies. Intermediate-mass black holes are theoretically predicted but observationally rare. Their existence at the centers of dwarf galaxies like NGC 404 would help explain how the supermassive black holes in large galaxies grew to their present sizes, potentially through the merger and growth of smaller black holes over cosmic time.

    In 2016, Italian amateur astronomer Giuseppe Donatiello discovered a faint dwarf spheroidal galaxy approximately 60 arc-minutes from NGC 404, possibly a satellite of the ghost galaxy itself. This object, nicknamed Mirach’s Goblin, has a distance estimate ranging from 8.1 to 11.4 million light-years, overlapping with NGC 404’s distance. Its relationship to NGC 404 remains unconfirmed pending more precise distance measurements. If physically associated, it would make NGC 404 not merely an isolated galaxy but a miniature system, a host galaxy with its own satellite, orbiting in a nearly empty pocket of the universe.

    WHAT THIS SANCTUARY CONTAINS

    Mirach: a red giant at magnitude 2.01 to 2.10, the brightest star in this sanctuary window, in the asymptotic giant branch phase of its evolution. Radius 86 times the Sun’s. Luminosity 1,675 times the Sun’s. Surface temperature 3,762 Kelvin. Actively shedding mass through a stellar wind, building a circumstellar envelope that will become a planetary nebula. Pulsating semiregularly on a timescale of 30 to 100 days. No fixed period. Listed in Babylonian star catalogs. The Arabic standard reference for dark-red stellar color. Will end its life as a white dwarf.

    NGC 404: a dwarf lenticular galaxy 22,000 light-years in diameter, moving toward us at 48 kilometers per second, one of the most isolated galaxies known with its nearest neighbor 3.6 million light-years away. Structurally altered approximately 900 million years ago by the absorption of a smaller galaxy, the evidence of which persists as two large rings of neutral hydrogen extending beyond the visible disk. Active star formation ongoing in those rings at a low level. A nuclear star cluster 100 light-years across at the center. A probable intermediate-mass black hole of tens of thousands of solar masses. A possible satellite dwarf galaxy discovered in 2016, not yet confirmed. Visible in small telescopes as a faint, round, diffuse glow, almost entirely hidden in the glare of Mirach 7 arc-minutes away.

    Two objects in the same 13-degree window of sky. One is in the process of releasing the accumulated mass of its own stellar life into space. The other was structurally remade by absorbing the mass of another galaxy, and still carries the structural evidence of that event 900 million years later. They have no physical connection. Their apparent proximity is a function of our line of sight: one 197 light-years distant, the other 10 million light-years distant, separated in actual space by a distance that dwarfs both of them combined.

    A star releasing its outer layers into space.
    A galaxy transformed by what it absorbed, 900 million years ago.
    One moving toward us. One dispersing outward.
    Separated by 10 million light-years.
    Sharing seven arc-minutes of sky.

  • Threshold: A Wild Harvested Tincture for Active Labor

    Ten moons you carried a life. Ten moons you shared one blood. One pulse. One slow, turning dance. Now the spiral opens.

    You are not being asked to endure. You are being asked to cross.

    The womb is the oldest muscle in the story. It gathers. It releases. It gathers again. Each wave is a tide, and you are the moon and the sea.

    The pain has a voice. It is not an enemy. It is the door speaking. It says: open here. Soften here. The cervix thins and widens, and the pain is the body tracking the opening.

    Deep in the brain, the old medicine wakes. Oxytocin rises. Endorphins rise. The wild inside you makes its own remedy and hands it to you in waves.

    Fear stands at the gate and calls for adrenaline. The body tightens. The door narrows. Warmth, darkness, touch, and trust call the other way. The door opens.

    The baby is not waiting. The baby is working.

    Each wave squeezes the child and slows the river through the placenta. In the rest, the river returns. The child’s own stress hormones surge, and the lungs clear and the eyes wake. The child makes endorphins too. Mother and baby cross the threshold together.

    The baby turns through the pelvis in a spiral. It descends, bows, rotates, lifts, and turns again. Your body knows this dance. So does the child.

    The placenta is the tree you grew together. It has fed your child since the first moons. When the child is born, the tree lets go, and the womb closes around the place where it grew.

    For fifteen years I have walked with these plants. Women have birthed with them for as long as there have been women.

    Native peoples called viburnums to ease cramping, and willow to ease pain. Birthroot carries its work in its name. Traditional Chinese medicine moves qi and blood through the pelvis, and has long worked with mugwort and day lily. The old herbalists carried raspberry leaf and yarrow into the birthing room.

    Now Let’s Introduce the Plants

    California poppy, wild lettuce, buttercup, willow, day lily, and velvet leaf. They settle the nerves and ease the ache. In my practice, velvet leaf is the gentlest of them.

    Cramp bark, black haw, and cinquefoil. They soften the grip of the muscle.

    Raspberry leaf, birthroot, mugwort, and yarrow. Yarrow is a powerful uterine plant. It has been in birthing rooms for generations.

    Ginger and lemon balm quiet the stomach. Winged elm soothes. Rosemary warms. Echinacea has long been a pain plant on the Plains. A quartz crystal rests in the batch as intention.

    Each plant makes space. None takes the work from you.

    Birth has been taken from the body and given to the clock. Cervical checks with no reason. Pushing on command before the body leads. Your body does not need to be managed. It needs to be trusted.

    Threshold is for those who trust their bodies explicitly. For those who know they are a part of the natural world. For those who are seeking a connection with the wild, in the most intimate moment of bringing life Earth side.

    How to Walk with Threshold

    Active labor only. Take 3 drops by mouth every 30 minutes through active labor. Use the dropper provided, as drop size varies. Do not begin before active labor.

    Share the ingredient list with the people who hold you before labor begins.

    Do not use Threshold if you have a bleeding disorder, take blood thinners, are allergic to aspirin, or have had a hemorrhage.

    Keep your people close. Know the signs that ask for more help: Bleeding that soaks a pad in an hour, a cord seen or felt before the baby, a baby who is still, or who does not breathe, fever, a pounding headache, or changes in sight

    The crone does not abandon the mother. She stays near, and she watches.

    You came to the threshold carrying one life.

    You will cross it carrying two.

    The spiral turns. You turn with it.

    These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease. See our Medical Disclaimer.

  • Thoughts in Early October

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  • Threshold: Active Labor Pain Relief Potion

    Threshold

    A wildcrafted tincture for active labor

    Ten moons you carried a life.

    Ten moons you shared one blood. One pulse. One slow, turning dance.

    Now the spiral opens.

    You are not being asked to endure.
    You are being asked to cross.

    The Descent

    The womb is the oldest muscle in the story. It gathers. It releases. It gathers again. Each wave is a tide, and you are the moon and the sea.

    The pain has a voice. It is not an enemy. It is the door speaking. It says: open here. Soften here. The cervix thins and widens, and the pain is the body tracking the opening.

    Deep in the brain, the old medicine wakes. Oxytocin rises. Endorphins rise. The wild inside you makes its own remedy and hands it to you in waves.

    Fear stands at the gate and calls for adrenaline. The body tightens. The door narrows. Warmth, darkness, touch, and trust call the other way. The door opens.

    The Two Who Are One

    The baby is not waiting. The baby is working.

    Each wave squeezes the child and slows the river through the placenta. In the rest, the river returns. The child’s own stress hormones surge, and the lungs clear and the eyes wake. The child makes endorphins too. Mother and baby cross the threshold together.

    The baby turns through the pelvis in a spiral. It descends, bows, rotates, lifts, and turns again. Your body knows this dance. So does the child.

    The placenta is the tree you grew together. It has fed your child since the first moons. When the child is born, the tree lets go, and the womb closes around the place where it grew.

    The Council of Plants

    For fifteen years I have walked with these plants. Women have birthed with them for as long as there have been women.

    Native peoples called viburnums to ease cramping, and willow to ease pain. Birthroot carries its work in its name. Traditional Chinese medicine moves qi and blood through the pelvis, and has long worked with mugwort and day lily. The old herbalists carried raspberry leaf and yarrow into the birthing room.

    The Quiet Ones. California poppy, wild lettuce, dried buttercup, willow, day lily, and velvet leaf. They settle the nerves and ease the ache. In my practice, velvet leaf is the gentlest of them.

    The Releasers. Cramp bark, black haw, and cinquefoil. They soften the grip of the muscle.

    The Women’s Plants. Raspberry leaf, birthroot, mugwort, and yarrow. Yarrow is a powerful uterine plant. It has been in birthing rooms for generations.

    The Settlers. Ginger and lemon balm quiet the stomach. Winged elm soothes. Rosemary warms. Echinacea has long been a pain plant on the Plains. A quartz crystal rests in the batch as intention.

    Each plant makes space. None takes the work from you.

    The Other Doors

    Birth has been taken from the body and given to the clock. Cervical checks with no reason. Pushing on command before the body leads. Your body does not need to be managed. It needs to be trusted.

    The epidural is another door. It has known effects. Longer pushing. More assisted births. Fever. In some studies, a sleepier baby and a slower start to nursing. Many women choose it and are helped. Know the cost, then choose.

    Threshold is a different door. For those who trust their bodies explicitly. For those who know they are a part of the natural world. For those who are seeking a connection with the wild, in the most intimate moment of bringing life Earth side.

    How to Walk with Threshold

    Active labor only. Take 3 drops by mouth every 30 minutes through active labor. Use the dropper provided, as drop size varies. Do not begin before active labor.

    Share the ingredient list with the people who hold you before labor begins.

    Do not use Threshold if you have a bleeding disorder, take blood thinners, are allergic to aspirin, or have had a hemorrhage.

    Keep your people close. Know the signs that ask for more help.

    • Bleeding that soaks a pad in an hour
    • A cord seen or felt before the baby
    • A baby who is still, or who does not breathe
    • Fever, a pounding headache, or changes in sight

    The crone does not abandon the mother. She stays near, and she watches.

    The Return

    You came to the threshold carrying one life.

    You will cross it carrying two.

    The spiral turns. You turn with it.

    These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease. See our Medical Disclaimer.

    Get Threshold Today!

  • Remembering Our Wild Kinship: The Science of Collaborative Nature

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  • Feral Remembering: 13 Moon Embodied Gathering

    I am creating a 13 month ongoing gathering. Here is the link to all the details about that. https://stephaniebacquetmathews.com/feral-remembering/

    I am putting the feelers out there finally. My own feral intuition has desired from me for the past 13 years to create a space and I want to offer it to you in this sacred space, first.

    I am creating a container of 13 women, to walk through the spiral of the year, and the 13 Lunar Cycles through the Lens of the Sacred Embodied Human Animal. To fully awaken our feral intuition, connect to our authentic selves, and remember who and what we are as a human. I have created retreats in the past, but I was trying to live up to someone else’s version of what a retreat offers.

    Authentically, I can only offer my own medicine. I have come to see the who and what I am offers things that you will not find at other retreats but it is not always comfortable. I am creating a healing space that will bring about transformation on an embodied level, rather than just being intellectually stimulating.

    The world is shifting and I feel it is vital to remember our connection with nature as a natural being. As a creature of this world. To remember the names of our brothers and sisters, the trees, animals, plants, crystals, and bugs. We are put one species that has forgotten that we too rely on this beautiful Earth for complete sustenance.

    With that being said, I am inviting 12 women to join me, to make a sacred, healing, intimate, container of women to truly remember our most authentic, feral selves. We will live in connection with the Earth, inside of a Womb of Earth, healing ourselves through a remembering and unraveling process, rather than looking outside of ourselves thinking we need anything to make us whole.

    We will be discovering our wholeness by removing, shattering, unraveling and remembering our most authentic selves.

    These embodied, physical gatherings will be happening throughout the spiral of the year, 8 total, in Southeast Missouri. Here we drink water out of the spring, are provided sustenance through the abundance of the land, and we have the Milky Way in the skies all year round. We will be held by earthen dwellings, while the fire holds sacred space for our stories. We will remember through an embodied sense of truly what life is meant to be.

    I am so excited to call this in, and I am eagerly holding space for you, if this feels aligned.

    Here is the application if you are interested. Thank you so much for being a part of my life and journey. https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdfUmWxS3jW5wz5oIgRBDTs5wRDiDytaP19pYPfF-tzcjZQww/viewform

  • Feral Remembering: 13 Moons of Embodied Gathering

    Feral Remembering | Thirteen Moon Embodying Experience

    FERAL REMEMBERING

    Thirteen Moons of Embodied Gathering

    Thirteen women. Eight immersions. Embodied gatherings, fully experiencing the 28 Celestial Sanctuaries, under the 13 moons.

    Join Us!

    This isn’t a retreat. In the typical sense.

    You may or may not have been to a retreat. They typically last a couple of days to a week, you connect, you cry, you laugh, and it honestly feels amazing.

    Then you fly or drive home. The sensation of connecting is carried in your body for a week, maybe two, glowing a little, different in a way you can feel but can’t quite name to the people who didn’t go. And then the random Tuesday happens. Things begin to go back to “normal.” Life begins to happen with the grocery list, things demanding your attention, and the thousand small tasks of an everyday life that was never built to hold what you touched living in community. And slowly, quietly, without ever deciding to let it go, the communal living experience is let go.

    Feral Remembering is not that.

    I am asking you, and the other 12 women, to hold space for an entire year. This is long enough for something to actually root. This is us holding space for an entire 13 lunar cycles, to hold space for the whole year of seasons. For us to go deeper, with each visit, rather than just getting to the surface of everything. I am asking you to carve out the time to create a community of women, who will do embodied, feral remembering together.

    If you know that something is wrong, and maybe you have known for years.

    Maybe your blood work comes back normal and you still feel like your body is at war with you.

    Maybe you have done therapy, yoga, supplements, have the morning routine, and you still wake up at 3am with your heart pounding for no reason you can name. Or maybe you can name it, but it fills your body with dread, grief, and rage.

    Maybe you have cried at things that seemed disproportionate to the people around you, like a documentary, a walk in the woods, a full moon, and quietly wondered if something was wrong with you.

    Nothing is wrong with you. You are not broken. You were severed, and your body has been telling you the truth about it this whole time.

    What actually changes with Feral Remembering?

    You will not just get more information. You most likely have a bookshelf full of information.

    What changes is remembering. This is not about intellectually doing another thing. This is about being in your body, on land, with other women who are done pretending they are fine too. Allowing this to unravel, root, and remember across a full year, held by a rhythm older than anything we have available in a typical retreat space. We will be utilizing eight gatherings turning with the spiral of the year, thirteen moons carrying us between them.

    The shape of the year

    Thirteen women move through this year on the land. Not an accident that it matches the thirteen moons, this circle is built the same way the year turns. We will move through the 8 seasonal shifts of the Spiral of the Year, meeting physically to practice, be seen, heard, and create intimacy. Then we will gather virtually each new moon and full moon, to expand upon our understandings, diving deeper into the practices of ancient knowing and skills.

    Spiral of the Year

    This container is built on the same structure as the book each woman receives when she joins, “Remembering: The Mystical Nature of the Sacred Embodied Human Animal.” The book is not supplemental reading. It is the map. The eight immersions are the territory the map describes, walked in a body, on land, in real time, instead of read about from a chair.

    Between each immersion, the deconstruction chapters do their work in a space that allows for it to be integrated, at home, in your own hands, so that what gets excavated in a book doesn’t need to be re-excavated in person. What happens on the land is the living half of the spiral. What happens in the book is the half that makes the living half possible.

    The Eight Physical Gatherings

    The First Exhale

    Spring balance — March 17-19, 2027

    There is a moment every spring when your body knows before your mind does. Not a calendar, not a myth, something that happens in your chest when the grass comes back and the air stops being cold in that particular winter way. Your whole nervous system exhales. This gathering meets that exhale on the land itself, the moment the dark and the light come back into balance, your body confirming what it wasn’t sure of all winter. We made it through.

    The Rising Passion

    Nature Blooms — April 23-25

    The land stops holding its breath and starts reaching. This is the gathering for the body’s own generative force, blood, desire, creation, held as holy rather than shameful. What every creature on this land already knows about wanting something and moving toward it without apology.

    The Long Light

    Summer peak — June 25-28, 2027

    The height of the year. Maximum light, maximum aliveness, nothing to prove and nothing to produce. This gathering is playfulness with no justification required, the body at its most alive and uncontrolled, joy held as its own reason for existing.

    Wild Abundance

    First harvest — August 4-8, 2027

    The earth delivering on her promise. This gathering is for receiving without earning it first, the first grain, the first fruit, proof that abundance is the nature of things rather than a reward for worthiness. What it feels like in the body to take what’s offered and call it enough.

    The Honest Shift

    Autumn balance — September 24-27, 2027

    The second balance of the year, and the more honest one. The trees release without performing a greenness they no longer have. This gathering holds the full range of what you actually feel, grief and beauty arriving together, as sacred rather than something to apologize for.

    The Thinning

    Death turning — November 5-7, 2027

    The veil goes permeable. This gathering is for the honest relationship with death, the ancestors, the parts of this year and this life that have already ended. The interior wilderness of the self, known instead of feared.

    The Deep Den

    Winter’s longest dark — December 18-21, 2026

    The point of maximum dark, and the fire lit from inside the circle rather than waited for from outside it. This gathering holds the ancient knowing that the light was never a rescue coming from somewhere else. It lives in us. Every gathering before this one arrives here.

    The First Stirring

    The quickening — January 29–February 1, 2027

    Ground still frozen, light already returning. This gathering is for what gets tended through the whole dark and what finally gets released at the threshold, so it doesn’t have to be carried into the turn that’s already coming.

    What we practice

    We eat seasonally, exactly as the land provides.

    Some gatherings are full of abundance. Lughnasadh will feed you from the first harvest. Others ask something different of you, February may be little more than squash, root vegetables, and bone broth, because that is what the earth is actually offering in that moment, not what a caterer can source. This is not deprivation. This is alignment. Your body learns what it feels like to eat the truth of a season instead of eating in spite of it.

    We move like animals, not like exercisers.

    Walking fallen logs. Using the natural obstacles already on the land instead of equipment built to simulate them. Presence and awareness over performance. This is not a workout. It’s a remembering of how a body that trusts itself actually moves.

    We do rage work.

    Embodiment instead of dissociation. Most of us were trained to leave our bodies the moment real feeling arrived. Here, anger gets a body to move through instead of a story to explain it away.

    We hold each other, without losing ourselves in each other.

    This is interdependent, not codependent. You will be held. You will also hold. No one here, including your guide, is exempt from being witnessed in her own unraveling.

    We look at our own foundations through a different lens entirely.

    Not what’s wrong with you as a civilized, colonized person trying to optimize her dysfunction. What’s true about you as a sacred embodied animal who was never broken to begin with. That shift alone creates new neurological pathways, a different relationship to your own history than the one you’ve been working from your whole life.

    We create.

    Each woman brings her own expression, her own passion, her own particular creativity into this space, and is met there, heard, fed, nourished, not managed into a shared format.

    Sobriety is required

    Every woman in this circle must be sober for every immersion. No coffee. No alcohol. No tobacco. No THC. No mushrooms. No other substances altering your body or mind.

    This will narrow who this is for, and that narrowing is intentional, not a side effect. A fully embodied sacred animal cannot be fully present through a substance. This container asks you to meet your own nervous system directly, including the parts of it a cup of coffee or a glass of wine have been quietly managing for you. If that’s a hard no for you right now, this isn’t the year for you to join, and that’s honest information, not a judgment.

    This is for you if:

    • You’ve already done the work, therapy, somatic practice, read the self help books, and you’re still searching.
    • You’re tired of optimizing. Tired of one more protocol, promising to fix a wound that was never yours alone to carry.
    • You’re exhausted by your own self-sufficiency, and you’re ready to be witnessed instead of doing it all.
    • You’re willing to sit in the dark, get your hands in the dirt, be uncomfortable, and stay.
    • Some part of you already senses that the life on the other side of this might look nothing like the one you’re living now, and instead of that frightening you, you are open to the shifts and experiences waiting on the other side.

    This is not for you if

    • You’re still looking outside yourself for the fix, the next procedure, the next purchase, the next surface correction to buy your way back into feeling acceptable in a body that was never the problem.
    • You want a nice weekend and a nice photo from it, not a real unraveling.
    • You need your current life, the career ladder, the appearance maintenance, the status, to stay fully intact around this work. This asks structures to move, not just one more practice added on top of an unchanged life.
    • You’re looking for information. You already have the book for that. This is not that.

    The investment

    This is a year-long container, that will ask you to shift into a version of yourself you may have only glimpsed. There is an aspect of the version of you that will no longer fit into the boxes you have created. By signing up you are accepting that your feral remembering is calling.

    The Womb: 8 Physical Immersive 3-5 Day Experiential Events

    Cost: $3,333

    All meals, shelter, and activities are covered in this price. Full Moon and New Moon virtual gatherings are included in this price, as well as a private group to discuss in between sessions. You are one of 13 women physically experiencing this shift together. This is a foundational part of the medicine. To remember what it felt like to be held by other women, in a space of vulnerability, trust and collaboration.

    The Cord: 26 Virtual Sessions — 13 New & 13 Full Moon Sessions

    Cost: $333 per Year or $33 per Month

    Full Moon and New Moon virtual gatherings, as well as a private group to discuss in between sessions. This virtual space is a way to connect with women all over the world, to create a global feral remembering. For us to dismantle, collaborate, heal, and remember our magic as an embodied human on this beautiful planet we all share.

    Applying does not commit you financially. Being offered a place does not obligate you to accept it.

    Why am I doing this now?

    My unraveling started more than twenty years ago, in a classroom, of all places. A Christian college, every Bible class I could take, and then the next year, world religions, women’s and gender studies, the floor quietly giving way under everything I’d been handed as fact. I kept going. A bachelor’s in psychology. A doctorate in metaphysical science. Credentials that taught me how these systems are built, and how thoroughly they can be taken apart.

    But the real unraveling didn’t happen in a classroom. It happened in my body.

    My first child was born at home with a midwife. My second, I caught myself, unassisted, in a bathtub, no one’s hands but mine and my husband’s. There is no seminar that teaches you what your body already knows how to do the moment you stop asking permission for it. I nursed them both for years, co-slept, practiced elimination communication instead of trusting a plastic training system to know my babies better than I did. Every one of those choices was a small refusal, a stepping back from a system that profits from women believing their bodies need managing.

    From 2018 to 2023, my husband, my children, and I lived on the road, on and off, in a bus, learning what a family actually needs versus what we’d been sold we needed. In the seasons we weren’t traveling, we built our home by hand, an earthbag house on our own land in southeast Missouri, growing food, building the kind of foodscape that doesn’t ask permission from a grocery store. I’ve practiced herbal medicine for over thirteen years, and it has been how I’ve provided for my family, in full, since 2019.

    I believe our bodies have gone off the course of our own evolution, chasing money and status and the need to feel successful while the body itself screams to be let out of captivity. I don’t believe the answer is rejecting every modern convenience, I use the technology that will help build the communities we’re actually going to need. I believe the answer is remembering. I celebrate the turn of the seasons, the spiral of the year, as a way of honoring my place inside nature rather than above it.

    I have spent my entire adult life deconstructing the programs, beliefs, and hierarchies I was handed, and I have not arrived anywhere final. I am still practicing my own feral remembering. I am not asking you to follow someone who has it finished. I’m asking you to walk a year with me, someone who is still walking it myself. As I believe the spiral never ends, only allows us to see it more clearly as we continue through.

    Questions

    Why a year instead of a retreat?

    Because a weekend gives you a feeling. A year gives you a rhythm you can actually live inside. With a year, we get to know the other women journeying with us, in a way that most people do not get intimacy in relationship anymore. Throughout an entire year, you may find it easier to unmask, reveal your true self, and allow yourself to be fully seen. A year allows for us to continue the journey of unraveling, over and over and over. Embodiment work is not a one time experience. Being in our body, present, allowing, and whole, is something that will take more than one weekend to experience.

    What if I can’t make every immersion?

    Not being able to make all eight sessions is understandable, but my intention is to have you be able to come to 6 of the 8 sessions. The new and full moon virtual sessions will be recorded but I would also like these to be a priority in your life, to create intimacy. Think of them as important dates, that you would move the world to make. This is something that would be a top priority in your life, rather than thinking of it like a vacation or get together.

    Is this religious or spiritual?

    No. This is not about transcending your body. This is about remembering you never needed to. This is drawing back into the sacred, which is about connection, not worship, not hierarchy. I believe everything is sacred. This work is about stepping much further back in time, while also moving forward out of obedience training, masking, patriarchy, and hierarchy. We are stepping into our most primal, feral, whole, embodied, present selves. This might take some getting used to, which is another reason we are giving ourselves a whole year of practice!

    Want to join us?

  • Events October

    I am sharing early, just in case I will be able to see some of you at these events!

  • September Fun!

    I know most of you are all over the country, but I will be in Southwest Missouri at the end of the Month, and in Taylorville Illinois the first weekend of October. I would love to see some of you IRL, as this brings me so much joy!

  • Mobility Recalibration Potion & Deep Relief Salve Blog

    Mobility Recalibration: Wildcrafted Herbal Formula for Joint Comfort & Movement | Magical Mothering
    Magical Mothering Apothecary · Wildcrafted Medicine

    Mobility Recalibration

    Joints are not passive hinges. They are living tissue, in constant conversation with the blood, the nervous system, and the body’s own inflammatory intelligence. This formula was built to speak to that whole conversation, not just quiet the pain coming off the end of it.

    Western medicine tends to treat a joint as its own isolated part, a hinge to be x-rayed, scoped, or replaced. The body doesn’t work that way. A joint is not a standalone structure. It’s the visible meeting point of systems that begin somewhere else entirely and never really stop talking to each other.

    When we start with the bone itself, inside long bones, the marrow is where the body manufactures its own blood, red cells, white cells, platelets, all of it, in a process happening continuously beneath the surface of every joint in the body. That blood then carries the raw material, oxygen, minerals, immune cells, everything tissue needs to maintain itself, out through circulation to the cartilage and synovium surrounding the joint. Cartilage has no blood vessels of its own. It cannot call for what it needs directly. It depends entirely on diffusion, on nutrients passing to it through the synovial fluid that bathes the joint, fluid that is itself produced by the synovial membrane and dependent on healthy circulation to be replenished and kept clean of inflammatory waste. Bone marrow, blood, synovial fluid, cartilage: this is one continuous supply chain, not four separate parts filed under four separate specialists.

    Inflammation understood this way is not an enemy attacking a joint from outside. It’s a systemic signal, moving through blood that started in bone marrow, arriving at tissue that depends on that same blood for its nourishment. When that signal runs too hot for too long, it isn’t just the joint that’s affected; it’s the whole chain feeding it, cartilage losing ground faster than the body can replace it, synovial fluid thickening or thinning, muscles bracing around the joint in protective tension that pulls on tendons and ligaments well beyond the joint itself. Pain, too, moves through a body-wide nervous system, not a local one. A joint that hurts changes how a person stands, how they walk, which muscles compensate, and that compensation shows up in the back, the hips, the shoulders, places the original injury never touched.

    Mobility Recalibration was formulated around that whole chain rather than the joint alone. Plants that support healthy circulation help move nourishment from the blood into tissue that cannot feed itself directly. Plants that calm the inflammatory signal are addressing something systemic, not local, easing a message traveling through the same blood the marrow produces. Plants that ease pain and nervous tension address the protective bracing that spreads discomfort outward from a single joint into the rest of the body’s movement. And the nutritive plants in this formula, the minerals, the antioxidants, the whole foods, feed the actual raw material that bone marrow, blood, and cartilage all draw from to keep doing this work day after day. None of these actions happen in isolation, because the body they’re supporting never worked in isolation to begin with.

    Usage Protocol

    Micro-Dosing Guide

    Standard Dose Take 3–7 drops under the tongue, holding for at least 20 seconds before swallowing. Take 2-3 times daily, especially upon rising and before bed.
    Acute Pain May be taken as often as every 30 minutes during periods of acute discomfort.
    Cycling Take for 5 days, then pause for 2 days, so the body does not become dependent on the formula. If two days off feels like too much at first, one day is a fine starting point, then build toward the full two-day pause over time.
    This product has not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease, including arthritis. The information shared here is educational and reflects traditional ethnobotanical use and current research on the plants discussed. This formula is intended to support the body’s natural inflammatory response, healthy circulation, and the nutritional terrain connective tissue depends on — not to replace diagnosis, monitoring, or treatment from a qualified physician. Several plants in this formula are potent, dose-sensitive, or require specific processing before use; consult a qualified healthcare provider before beginning any herbal formula, especially alongside a diagnosed condition, existing medication, pregnancy, or in children.

    The Formula

    Each of the plants in this formula are wildcrafted or intentionally grown, grouped by which ecology of the body they speak to most directly: pain and the nervous system, circulation and the inflammatory response, the structural tissue of the joint itself, and the nutritive ground underneath all three.

    • Wild Lettuce
    • Buttercup
    • California Poppy
    • Jewelweed
    • Tulip Poplar
    • Olive Leaf
    • Cleavers
    • Yucca
    • Chickweed
    • Red Clover
    • Blackberry
    • Desert Lavender
    • Catnip
    • Myrrh
    • Cottonwood
    • Yarrow
    • Ocotillo
    • Cuscuta
    • Rosemary
    • Pineapple Weed
    • River Birch
    • Cramp Bark
    • Day Lily
    • Elephant’s Foot
    • Ground Ivy
    • MayPop
    • Prickly Ash
    • Purple Dead Nettle
    • Bindweed
    • Piñon Pine Resin
    • Horse Nettle
    • Velvet Leaf
    • Agave Alcohol
    • Quartz Crystal

    Terrain One: Pain & the Nervous System

    Plants that ease the pain signal itself and the muscular bracing that builds up around a joint in chronic discomfort.

    Wild Lettuce
    Lactuca virosa Pain Terrain · Analgesic & Sedative

    Wild lettuce is named for the milky latex, called lactucarium, that seeps from its stem when cut, historically used as a milder alternative to opium poppy for pain and sleep. Its sesquiterpene lactones act on the nervous system to ease pain perception and quiet the body toward rest, which is part of why it has such a long traditional record for conditions where pain and sleeplessness feed each other, as they often do in chronic joint discomfort. Because its sedative action it softens an overactive pain response without numbing sensation entirely.

    California Poppy
    Eschscholzia californica Pain Terrain · Non-Narcotic Analgesic

    California poppy is a member of the poppy family but contains no morphine and carries no narcotic or addictive profile, a distinction herbalists are careful to make given its relatives. Its isoquinoline alkaloids act on the same general neurotransmitter pathways as its more potent cousins, producing a gentle, non-narcotic pain relief alongside a calming, sedative effect at higher doses and a milder anxiety-easing effect at lower ones. Native American use of the whole plant, root included, for pain, toothache, and sleeplessness is long-standing, and its safety profile is considered gentle enough that some traditional herbalists have used it with children. In this formula it works alongside wild lettuce, rounding out the pain terrain with a plant whose calming action extends as readily to the nervous system as to the pain signal itself.

    Catnip
    Nepeta cataria Pain Terrain · Nervine & Antispasmodic

    Catnip’s reputation as a cat toy obscures its long human use as a gentle nervine and antispasmodic, traditionally taken as tea for tension, cramping, and restlessness. In a formula addressing joint pain, catnip’s value lies in what it does around the joint rather than in the joint itself: easing the muscular guarding and general nervous tension that builds up in a body managing ongoing discomfort.

    MayPop
    Passiflora incarnata Pain Terrain · Nervine & Sleep Support

    Passionflower, known locally as maypop for the popping sound its ripe fruit makes underfoot, has research supporting its traditional reputation as a calming nervine, working through GABA pathways in the nervous system much the way certain pharmaceutical anti-anxiety compounds do, without the same dependency profile. Chronic joint pain frequently disrupts sleep, and disrupted sleep in turn lowers pain tolerance the next day, a cycle passionflower is well suited to interrupt. Its inclusion here supports rest as part of pain management.

    Jewelweed
    Impatiens capensis Anti-inflammatory & Antihistamine

    Jewelweed’s succulent stem carries a mucilaginous sap containing lawsone, a compound with documented antihistamine and anti-inflammatory action, most famously used to prevent and soothe poison ivy rash. That same anti-inflammatory, antipruritic action has a long folk history of topical use for bruises, sprains, and joint swelling directly at the skin’s surface. Folk use of consuming the tea, or in this case micro dose of the tincture, has been known to help promote blood flow, ease post-child birth pain, and ease joint pain. They also believed that drinking jewel weed tea in the late summer helped build up immunity to poison oak rashes the following year. Despite a lack of clinical trials, folk medicine has proven over generations to help in their local communities.

    Cramp Bark
    Viburnum opulus Pain Terrain · Antispasmodic

    Cramp bark earns its name directly: its bark has been used traditionally, and specifically, for muscular cramping and spasm, working as a smooth and skeletal muscle relaxant. Around a chronically painful joint, surrounding muscles often lock into a protective, guarding tension that becomes its own source of pain over time. Cramp bark addresses that guarding directly, complementing the nerve-calming action of catnip and passionflower with a more targeted muscular release.

    Ground Ivy
    Glechoma hederacea Pain Terrain · Anti-inflammatory & Expectorant

    Ground ivy spreads low along shaded lawns and forest edges, easy to overlook, with a traditional folk reputation as an anti-inflammatory and mild diuretic used for a range of chronic complaints, joint discomfort included. Its historical use as a general tonic for lingering inflammation gives it a supportive aspect, working steadily alongside the more targeted analgesics.

    Purple Dead Nettle
    Lamium purpureum Pain Terrain · Anti-inflammatory

    Purple dead nettle, unrelated to stinging nettle despite the shared name, is one of the earliest edible and medicinal plants to appear in spring across much of the country, carrying a traditional reputation as an anti-inflammatory and mild astringent. Its gentle profile makes it an easy, abundant addition to a formula meant for daily, ongoing use, and its early-season availability means it is often one of the first fresh plants a wildcrafter has access to each year. Each spring, nature gives our body exactly what it needs after a stagnant and often nutrient lacking few months. These early spring plants are potent in medicine and the body readily accepts their medicine.

    Terrain Two: Circulation & Inflammatory Response

    Plants that support blood flow to joint tissue and speak to the body’s broader inflammatory signaling.

    Buttercup
    Ranunculus spp. Circulation Terrain · Counter-Irritant

    Buttercup’s traditional use in folk medicine, for rheumatism, gout, and sore joints, comes from an unusual mechanism: the plant is genuinely irritating to tissue, and that irritation draws fresh, nutrient-rich blood to the area it contacts, historically applied as a poultice for exactly this counter-irritant effect. Fresh buttercup contains protoanemonin, an acrid compound that causes blistering, and is not safe to use unprocessed.

    Yarrow
    Achillea millefolium Circulation Terrain · Anti-inflammatory & Vulnerary

    Yarrow carries one of the longest medicinal records of any plant in North America and Europe, traditionally used on wounds for its ability to slow bleeding and reduce inflammation at once. Its flavonoid and sesquiterpene content supports a general anti-inflammatory action, and its long-standing use as a circulatory tonic, moving blood toward tissue that needs it while calming the inflammatory response already underway there.

    Tulip Poplar
    Liriodendron tulipifera Circulation Terrain · Stimulant Tonic

    Tulip poplar is not a true poplar at all, it’s a member of the magnolia family, and its medicine is its own. Its root bark carries a long Eclectic and Native American record as a stimulant tonic with diaphoretic properties, historically used specifically for chronic rheumatism, gout, and dyspepsia, alongside broader use as a fever remedy and general tonic. The bark’s alkaloid content, principally tulipiferine, is described in historical sources as having marked effects on the heart and nervous system. Externally, the bark tea was traditionally used as a wash and poultice on wounds and boils.

    Prickly Ash
    Zanthoxylum americanum Circulation Terrain · Circulatory Stimulant & Analgesic

    Prickly ash bark carries a traditional reputation, going back through both Indigenous and Eclectic physician use, as a circulatory stimulant with a distinctive tingling, numbing action on contact, historically chewed for tooth pain and used more broadly for rheumatic and arthritic complaints. Its alkylamide content is responsible for that numbing sensation, and its warming, blood-moving action is traditionally paired with other joint-focused herbs specifically to help move stagnant circulation into tissue that pain has caused a person to protect and under-use.

    River Birch
    Betula nigra Circulation Terrain · Salicin Source

    River birch bark carries salicin, the same class of compound willow bark is best known for, and the natural precursor from which aspirin was originally derived. Traditional use of birch bark for aches, fevers, and inflammation. It works through a related pathway to common over-the-counter pain relievers.

    Cottonwood
    Populus deltoides Circulation Terrain · Anti-inflammatory Resin

    Cottonwood’s resin-coated spring buds, sometimes called balm of Gilead across related Populus species, carry salicin and populin alongside a fragrant resin traditionally infused into oil for topical anti-inflammatory and analgesic use on sore joints and muscles. That same resin content supports internal anti-inflammatory action as well, placing cottonwood in the same salicin family as river birch but with its own distinct resinous, warming character.

    Ocotillo
    Fouquieria splendens Circulation Terrain · Lymphatic & Membrane Support

    Ocotillo bark, harvested from the tall, whip-like desert plant of the American Southwest, carries a strong reputation in herbal tradition for supporting fluid movement through the body’s tissues, often described as working on the cellular membrane level to help stagnant fluid and congestion move again. In a joint formula, that fluid-moving reputation is relevant to synovial and lymphatic circulation around a joint that pain has caused to go underused and, in turn, more stagnant.

    Horse Nettle
    Solanum carolinense Circulation Terrain · Antispasmodic

    Horse nettle root carries a genuine historical record as an internal antispasmodic and anodyne. This powerful plant is part of the nightshade family and is used sparingly in this formula. Its potency is included in this formula as its historical use and abundance in availability create space for deep restoration in sleep, ease of tension and pain. Often the very things that are most prolific in our yards, offer the same deep profound medicine that is needed in our lives.

    Desert Lavender
    Hyptis emoryi Circulation Terrain · Aromatic Relaxant

    Desert lavender, unrelated botanically to true lavender but similarly aromatic, is a Southwestern desert shrub used traditionally as a mild relaxant and digestive aid. Its inclusion here softens the more stimulating circulatory herbs around it, the way an aromatic plant often rounds out a formula’s edges, and it contributes a gentle, calming quality that supports the nervous system alongside the terrain-one nervines.

    Myrrh
    Commiphora myrrha Circulation Terrain · Anti-inflammatory Resin

    Myrrh resin has been used across multiple traditional medicine systems, Ayurvedic, Chinese, and Middle Eastern alike, for pain and inflammation, and modern research has identified sesquiterpenes in the resin with genuine anti-inflammatory and analgesic activity. Historically prized for wound and injury support, myrrh’s resinous, warming character pairs naturally with cottonwood and prickly ash, rounding out the formula’s resin-and-bark-based anti-inflammatory work.

    Terrain Three: Joint & Connective Tissue

    Plants traditionally associated with the structural tissue of the joint itself: cartilage, synovial fluid, tendon, and the lymphatic drainage that clears debris from around them.

    Cleavers
    Galium aparine Structural Terrain · Lymphatic Drainage

    Cleavers is one of the most reliable lymphatic herbs in Western herbalism, moving lymphatic fluid and supporting the clearing of cellular debris and inflammatory byproducts from tissue. Around a chronically inflamed joint, that drainage function matters directly: inflammation generates waste, and if the lymphatic system carrying that waste away becomes sluggish, the local inflammatory burden simply accumulates instead of resolving. Cleavers keeps that exit route open.

    Yucca
    Yucca schidigera / glauca Structural Terrain · Saponin Anti-inflammatory

    Yucca root carries steroidal saponins that have been studied specifically for joint-related anti-inflammatory action, and it holds one of the longest-standing traditional reputations among American plants for arthritis and rheumatism support, used by numerous Indigenous nations across the Southwest for exactly this purpose. Its saponin content is thought to interfere with some of the inflammatory compounds involved in joint irritation, giving yucca a more targeted, joint-specific reputation than many of the broader anti-inflammatory plants in this formula.

    Elephant’s Foot
    Elephantopus tomentosus / carolinianus Structural Terrain · Lymphatic & Anti-inflammatory

    Elephant’s foot, a native woodland plant of the American South and Midwest, carries documented anti-inflammatory sesquiterpene lactones alongside a traditional reputation for decongesting the lymphatic system, particularly around joints and deep tissue. Its dual lymphatic-and-anti-inflammatory action pairs it closely with cleavers, reinforcing the formula’s drainage work from a second angle.

    Olive Leaf
    Olea europaea Structural Terrain · Antioxidant & Circulatory

    Olive leaf’s primary active constituent, oleuropein, has a substantial research record for antioxidant and anti-inflammatory activity, along with support for healthy blood pressure and circulation. In this formula, olive leaf’s circulatory support underlines the same logic driving the resin-and-bark herbs in terrain two: tissue that isn’t well perfused with blood has a harder time maintaining and repairing itself, cartilage very much included, given how directly it depends on surrounding circulation for nourishment.

    Cuscuta
    Cuscuta spp. Structural Terrain · Traditional Tonic

    Cuscuta, commonly called dodder, is a leafless, parasitic vine that draws its nourishment entirely from the plants it climbs, and its seed has a long-standing place in Traditional Chinese Medicine as a tonic associated with supporting the tendons, sinews, and lower back. That traditional structural association is why cuscuta sits in this terrain rather than elsewhere in the formula, though its research base is considerably thinner than the other plants here, and it is best understood as a traditional-use inclusion rather than one with strong modern clinical support.

    Bindweed
    Convolvulus spp. Structural Terrain · Traditional Use, Limited Documentation

    Bindweed is best known as a persistent field and garden vine, and its internal medicinal use is far less documented than most other plants in this formula. Some Convolvulus species have a folk history of use for inflammation, though the record is thin and inconsistent across species, and some related vines in this family carry purgative properties in higher doses. I’d want to know specifically which species and plant part you’re working with, and what your source for its inclusion is, before this entry claims more than the evidence actually supports.

    Velvet Leaf
    Abutilon theophrasti Structural Terrain · Traditional Use, Limited Documentation

    Velvet leaf is more widely known as a fiber and cover crop plant than a medicinal one in Western herbalism, though its seed has some traditional use in Chinese medicine, generally associated with vision and urinary support rather than joints specifically. Its fit within a joint-and-pain formula isn’t strongly established in what I could verify. If you’re working from a specific traditional or regional use for velvet leaf in joint or connective tissue support, I’d want that detail before writing a firmer mechanism claim than the evidence holds.

    Terrain Four: Nutritive Ground

    Whole plants feeding the antioxidant and mineral terrain the body draws on for ongoing tissue maintenance.

    Chickweed
    Stellaria media Nutritive Terrain · Cooling & Mineral-Rich

    Chickweed is one of the most versatile cooling, drawing plants in the herbal world, traditionally used to reduce local heat and swelling while also serving as a deeply nutritive food source, carrying a concentrated mineral and vitamin profile. In this formula, chickweed brings a gentle, nourishing counterweight to the more stimulating and potent herbs around it, supplying the raw nutritive material tissue repair actually depends on.

    Red Clover
    Trifolium pratense Nutritive Terrain · Alterative

    Red clover has a long traditional reputation as an alterative, an old herbal term for a plant believed to support the body’s gradual, ongoing process of clearing and renewing itself. Its isoflavone content carries a separate research record for mild anti-inflammatory and antioxidant activity, and its traditional pairing with other blood-supportive herbs makes it a natural fit for a formula built around sustained, long-term terrain support rather than acute intervention.

    Blackberry
    Rubus fruticosus Nutritive Terrain · Myricetin & Ellagitannins

    Blackberry’s deep color reflects a real polyphenol density, testing particularly high in myricetin alongside ellagitannins, both compounds with documented antioxidant and anti-inflammatory research behind them. Abundant across Missouri hedgerows through summer, blackberry adds nutrient density and flavor to a formula that otherwise leans heavily on bark, root, and resin.

    Day Lily
    Hemerocallis fulva Nutritive Terrain · Anti-inflammatory

    Day lily brings a cooling, anti-inflammatory action traditionally used to reduce heat and swelling in irritated tissue, alongside support for the liver’s detoxification processes. In a formula asking the body to process ongoing inflammatory byproducts from joint tissue, that liver support matters as much as any single joint-targeted herb, since the liver is what ultimately clears much of what inflammation leaves behind.

    Pineapple Weed
    Matricaria discoidea Nutritive Terrain · Antispasmodic

    A wild relative of chamomile found along paths and driveways, pineapple weed carries its family’s traditional reputation for calming irritated, spasming tissue, used as tea or tincture for over a century. Its gentle, pleasant flavor makes it an easy, approachable addition to a formula meant to be taken consistently, day after day, rather than only reached for in a flare.

    Rosemary
    Salvia rosmarinus Nutritive Terrain · Antioxidant & Circulatory

    Rosemary’s rosmarinic and carnosic acid content offers substantial antioxidant protection against the cellular stress that chronic inflammation generates, and its circulatory stimulant action increases blood flow to peripheral tissue, joints included. Traditionally used as a catalyst herb, taken alongside other plants to help the body take them up more effectively, rosemary closes out this terrain the way it closes out most formulas it appears in: as a steady, reliable partner to everything around it.

    Piñon Pine Resin
    Pinus edulis Nutritive Terrain · Resin

    Piñon pine resin has a long tradition of use across the American Southwest, applied topically for wounds and drawing infection, and its diterpene content carries anti-inflammatory properties consistent with conifer resins more broadly. Its inclusion here reflects that regional tradition and brings a warm, grounding, sap-forward character to the base of the formula.

    Agave Alcohol
    Agave tequilana — grain-free extraction base Extraction Medium · Preservation · Rapid Delivery

    Alcohol remains the most effective solvent for extracting and preserving the full range of plant constituents in this formula, from resins and alkaloids to volatile oils and water-soluble compounds. Agave alcohol is chosen specifically because it’s grain-free, making the formula accessible to those with gluten sensitivity. Sublingual absorption through the mucous membranes of the mouth delivers these constituents into the bloodstream quickly, which matters directly for a formula designed around micro-dosing and rapid response to acute pain.

    Quartz Crystal
    Silicon dioxide — clear quartz, infused with each batch Amplifier · Coherence · Energetic Carrier

    Every batch of Mobility Ease is made with quartz crystal, a coherent crystalline structure used across human cultures for thousands of years in medicine, ceremony, and technology, with measurable piezoelectric properties. In the context of this formula, quartz supports the coherence and intelligence of the plant constituents as they work together, an acknowledgment that medicine carries information as well as chemistry.

    The Whole Picture

    Wild lettuce, California Poppy, catnip, maypop, cramp bark, ground ivy, and purple dead nettle meet the pain signal and the nervous system directly. Buttercup, yarrow, prickly ash, river birch, cottonwood, ocotillo, horse nettle, desert lavender, and myrrh move blood and calm inflammation through the tissue surrounding a joint. Cleavers, yucca, elephant’s foot, olive leaf, and cuscuta speak to the structural tissue of the joint itself and the drainage that clears debris away from it. Chickweed, red clover, blackberry, day lily, pineapple weed, rosemary, and piñon pine resin feed the nutritive terrain the whole system depends on for ongoing maintenance.

    This is a formula built to support the body’s own capacity to manage pain, circulation, and tissue upkeep, not to override the pain signal alone. It works alongside your physician’s care and monitoring, not in place of it — particularly for a diagnosed condition like arthritis, where the underlying joint changes benefit from professional tracking over time.

    The Topical Companion: Deep Relief Salve

    Where Mobility Recalibration works from the inside, taken sublingually, Deep Relief Salve works at the surface, applied directly over a sore joint, strained muscle, or specific injury. Topical application reaches tissue through a different route entirely, and it allows for plants whose profile suits skin contact better than internal use, alongside a few that overlap with the tincture’s own terrain.

    • Wingstem
    • Rabbit Tobacco
    • Comfrey Root
    • Yucca
    • Balm of Gilead
    • Sassafras
    • Honey Locust
    • Cayenne
    • Mint
    • St. John’s Wort
    • Stinging Nettle
    • Ginger
     
     
    Wingstem
    Verbesina alternifolia Topical Use · Traditional Joint Support

    Wingstem, sometimes called yellow ironweed, grows tall along creek edges and open bottomland, easy to spot by the ridged “wings” running down its stem. Several Native American groups historically used wingstem specifically for joint pain, alongside gastrointestinal complaints and as an eye remedy. It’s a plant with a real traditional record but a thin modern research base, which is exactly why I include in my formulas. Honoring ethnobotany uses of historical plants, creates medicine unlike any other.

     
    Rabbit Tobacco
    Pseudognaphalium obtusifolium Topical Use · Muscle Cramp & Local Pain

    Rabbit tobacco, also called sweet everlasting for the maple-syrup scent it releases when crushed, has a specific and well-documented Cherokee use: an infusion applied topically over the site of muscle cramps, local pain, and twitching. That traditional application use is used in this salve, to be applied directly to a cramping muscle or aching joint the same way it was used generations ago.

     
    Comfrey Root
    Symphytum officinale Topical Use · Anti-inflammatory & Tissue Support

    Comfrey’s traditional name, knitbone, reflects centuries of topical use on bruises, sprains, and inflamed joints, and a 2013 clinical study specifically found that a topical comfrey preparation eased osteoarthritis knee pain. Its allantoin content supports skin and tissue repair, while rosmarinic acid and tannins contribute anti-inflammatory and astringent action at the site of application. Comfrey root contains pyrrolizidine alkaloids with documented hepatotoxic potential when taken internally, which is why current guidance from the FDA and the European Medicines Agency restricts it to topical application on unbroken skin.

     
    Yucca
    Yucca schidigera / glauca Topical Use · Saponin Anti-inflammatory

    Yucca root’s steroidal saponins carry one of the longest-standing traditional reputations among American plants for arthritis and rheumatism, used by numerous Indigenous nations across the Southwest. Infused into a salve base, that same saponin activity works directly at the joint’s surface, complementing its role in Mobility Ease’s internal formula with a second, topical route to the same tissue.

     
    Balm of Gilead
    Populus balsamifera Topical Use · Resinous Anti-inflammatory

    Balm of Gilead refers to the resin-coated spring buds of balsam poplar, traditionally infused into oil specifically for topical use on sore joints and muscles, one of the most iconic salve bases in North American folk herbalism. Its salicin and populin content, the same aspirin-precursor compounds found in willow and river birch, supports genuine anti-inflammatory action, and its fragrant resin gives this salve much of its traditional character and scent.

     
    Sassafras
    Sassafras albidum

    Sassafras root bark has a long folk history as a topical liniment for rheumatism, historically valued for its warming, mildly counter-irritant effect on skin. The deep use of folk remedies in this salve shares the wisdom of working directly with one’s environment for healing and relief. Eugenol is a natural compound that acts as an anti-inflammatory agent. It inhibits COX-2 enzymes, which are responsible for causing pain and swelling in the body, similar to how some over-the-counter pain relievers work. Eugenol is also what gives cloves their numbing, pain-relieving qualities. Safrole is a major volatile oil found in sassafras, safrole contributes to the plant’s numbing and antiseptic qualities, though it also can carries health risks if used internally or on open wounds.

     
    Honey Locust
    Gleditsia triacanthos Topical Use · Anti-inflammatory

    Honey locust’s pods and thorns carry tannins, flavonoids, and saponins with modern doctorate studies showing anti-inflammatory activity; research on the related species Gleditsia sinensis specifically found thorn extracts reduced swelling and inhibited the development of adjuvant-induced arthritis in animal models.

    Cayenne
    Capsicum annuum Topical Use · Counter-Irritant & Analgesic

    Cayenne’s capsaicin is one of the most well-studied topical analgesics in the plant world, the active ingredient behind numerous over-the-counter arthritis and muscle-pain creams. Capsaicin works by depleting substance P, a neurotransmitter involved in transmitting pain signals, so that repeated application gradually reduces the area’s pain sensitivity. It also brings genuine warming, circulatory stimulation to the surface it’s applied to, making it one of the more mechanistically direct plants in this entire salve.

     
    Mint
    Mentha spp. Topical Use · Cooling Analgesic

    Mint’s menthol content activates cold-sensing receptors in the skin, producing the cooling sensation that has made it a staple of topical pain preparations for generations. That cooling effect also has a genuine counter-irritant, mild analgesic action, and mint pairs naturally with cayenne’s warming action, giving the salve both a cooling and a warming layer working at once, the way many traditional liniments are built.

    St. John’s Wort
    Hypericum perforatum Topical Use · Nerve & Tissue Support

    St. John’s Wort has a specific traditional reputation for nerve-related pain, historically used for nerve damage, sciatica, and shooting nerve pain in particular, alongside general anti-inflammatory action. Its hypericin content is photosensitizing, making skin treated with it can burn more easily in direct sun. So being mindful of use in areas exposed to sunlight.

     
    Stinging Nettle
    Urtica dioica Topical Use · Counter-Irritant

    Stinging nettle’s fresh sting is itself a folk remedy for arthritis, a practice called urtication, deliberately applying the fresh leaf to draw blood flow and trigger a mild counter-irritant response over a painful joint. Prepared into a salve, dried or tinctured nettle loses that literal sting but retains its broader anti-inflammatory profile, giving this formula both a nod to that old practice and a gentler, more consistent topical action.

     
    Ginger
    Zingiber officinale Topical Use · Warming Anti-inflammatory

    Ginger’s gingerols and shogaols carry genuine anti-inflammatory activity and a warming, circulatory effect, traditionally applied as a compress or infused oil directly over sore joints and muscles. Alongside cayenne, ginger reinforces this salve’s warming half, working the same tissue from a gentler angle.

     
     

    Two Formulas, One Purpose

    Mobility Recalibration and Deep Relief Salve are built to work together rather than as alternatives to each other: one taken sublingually to work systemically through the blood, nervous system, and connective tissue terrain, the other applied directly over the specific joint or muscle that’s asking for attention. Used together, they meet the same pain from both directions at once.

    Mobility Recalibration and Deep Relief Salve are available in the Magical Mothering Apothecary.

    Get Mobility Ease

    Get Deep Relief Salve