the plants made me do it: leaving instagram

finally

Hi friends, 

I've been deep in the throes of summer, harvesting herbs, making medicine, teaching, all of it. There's some upcoming events & other little offerings at the bottom of the newsletter, but the real meat of the offering today is about leaving social media with the encouragement of the plants ~~~~ onward! 

i. July 7, 2024

Mary Oliver says “Attention is the beginning of devotion.”

I no longer want to be devoted to instagram. I logged off today. 

ii. march 2014

My first-ever instagram post is a photo of a blackberry essence that I made in Big Sur at sunset. I use it often in my client work. Blackberry is a plant that knows how to cast a circle. Blackberry says: let me assert my will here. Emphasizing focus, invoking clarity, encouraging structure; blackberry shows us how to bear fruit. It is an essence of creative direction, moving our energy to deeper presence and connection. Fast forward ten years, I no longer have that essence bowl, but I do have the essence. This is the medicine I have been dosing with this week. Casting a circle. 

iii. 2014-2024

I realize I've been on instagram for ten years. Ten years. Ten years of growing a business, ten years of making many wonderful connections, ten years of feeling how my brain has been shaped by this platform. Over the past two years, it has become clear that it's not working but I still don't do anything about it. I hold on with the excuse of needing instagram for my business. Which is maybe true. I'm not sure what it looks like to have a business off instagram, if I will be able to make the money I need without having that space to promote my work. I've always had this business on instagram. But I keep asking myself, what if I can do it? What if I go back to hanging flyers around town? What if my income drops but I find myself with more time to write a book? What if I embody the way I want to be in the world? What if I finally open the herb school of my dreams and I need instagram to promote it? What if I don't have to watch another reel ever again? 

iv. April 2024

It's Nettle month in Herbal Mystery School. After drinking and eating nettles every day for a month, I become acutely aware of my vitality. Nettle helps us mirror the lush green world & my energy swells, a welcome burst of life force in early spring. However, we know nettle has a sting; the precision of the nettle-spear is frictional medicine. By feeling more power circulating in my body, it is easy to sense the places where I am also draining energy. I become painfully aware of everything that is dissonant to this vital force. My time spent on social media becomes more uncomfortable, more numbing. I ask nettle what to do about it and nettle laughs at the played-out question before sending a reckoning pulse through my blood: you choose to forget your magic.

v. Everyday Thoughts

What if I feel irrelevant? Then I ask myself what is relevant: Redwing blackbirds. Swimming in the Sawkill river. Picking cherries with friends, making teas for the apple trees in the orchard. My family. Making medicine, keeping the apothecary well-stocked. Sending out medicine to mutual aid groups. Deep conversations with clients. Watching my students be changed by the plants, feeling their excitement. Watching the nettle patch, the blooming hollyhock reaching for the sky. 

vi. Rose Harvest, June 2024

I am preparing for my wedding this fall. I am harvesting roses on the coast. I am thinking about this ceremony that we are composing, what it means to bring the ancestors together in this way. I want to step into this threshold time with great intention. Rose is a plant that shows us how to sustain care. This is my devotion. The basket is heavy with petals. 

**

I know I don't usually use this space to talk about social media but the thoughts have been swirling and more and more people I know are increasingly at a loss/confused/frustrated with it. I'm grateful I get to navigate these big questions and shifts with the plants as guides. Special shout out to this year's cohort of Herbal Mystery School… sometimes what the plants ask us to do is uncomfortable and hard and this crew of folks still shows up willing to be shaped and changed anyway! I'm learning a lot. 

&& thank you for being a newsletter subscriber. It means a lot to be connected with you in this way, which feels much sweeter and personal and in alignment for me at this time. I'm grateful! 

With roses, nettles & blackberry flowers,

xx liz 

A few added delights:

~ I drove to Maine earlier in the month, leaving my house at sunrise and listened to this program on my favorite nts show. A good companion for the journey.

~ I'm teaching an intro to flower essences class via Seagrape Apothecary on August 4th! Come join us! 

~ Wanted to plug my friend Cody Cook-Parrot weekly writing group, Landscapes, that starts up next week! Not only does Cody cultivate such sweet and empowering spaces for making work together (I always feel very inspired and get a lot of writing done!), I am so grateful to Cody's years of writing about social media that has helped me shape my own thoughts around ig and has also helped me realize the power of my own agency.

~ Artist Lindsay Costello has one of my favorite newsletters out there called Pink Dogwood. I can't recommend it enough, it's an incredibly rich resource that is sent out every month. She wrote about taking a social media break this spring and I appreciated these words, “The only thing that calms this fear is the idea that I'll be an artist until the day I die, making poetry of my own small life. What choice do I have but to believe this? Whether it is a meal or a moment, when I pare down, I find art there. And I don't know that it's possible to waste a life on what you love.”

~ I'll be dancing the night away at Supernature at World's End at the end of the month! 

See you under the big disco ball?