Once per month on the 4th Tuesday at 8pm, I host a Tea and Chanting session at my shop, The Sacred Well in Oakland, CA. For each session, I prepare an intention for the group to consider, a new tea recipe to try, and a mantra that we will all chant 108 times. We then settle in to our meditation space, sip tea, chant, and increase our overall wholeness, wellness, and quality of energy with this practice. There is something really satisfying about this ritual. It clears and opens significant channels of energy and healing via the throat chakra.

I extend this experience in myTea and Incantation class in The Witch's Garden series as an exploration of how the art of drinking tea and chanting can positively affect the body, mind, and spirit. The throat, an important gateway of speech, song, breath, and consumption of food and drink, deserves lots of warm, kind, honeyed love. How many times per day do you find yourself talking, talking, talking or listening, listening, listening, and longing for silence? How often do you feel like you can't even catch a breath because you feel overrun and overwhelmed? We all feel that way sometimes. Drinking tea and chanting can be a great antidote to a loud and stressful environment, job, or life circumstances.

Incantation (chanting) is also an amazing magical tool for bringing about healing. A good chant, well-written, careful, delivered with intention and personal power, can vibrationally re-align the cells and tissues toward health via the water contained therein. If that water is steeped with healing herbs, all the better.

I live in an animated universe, where everything has a spirit. In my world, living things each have an indwelling spirit, or self-hood, as well as the collective spirit of the larger designations to which they belong. For example, in my home, each of my 5 cats has a distinct personality, color, body shape, name, and voice. Yet they definitely also all share certain qualities of 'cat-ness', including 'catitude', the love of chasing string and feathers, and wide, haunting eyes of doom that will bore into your soul when the food dish happens to be empty. So, when I think of the 'spirit of cat', I tend to think of those shared characteristics. And when I think about an individual cat, say my little Obi-Wan, I think of his particular version of catness: fluffy, opinionated, middle-of-the-night-singing, fetch-playing, prancing-with-joy-at-his-own-cleverness.

The same goes for my understanding of humans, other animals, crystals, and plants. Each has its own unique nature, but is also part of the great chorus of our kind in Gaea's song. The spirit of Willow has been an ally to me since I was a small child, and would swing in her branches with my friend Molly. Although I now live across the country from that Willow and she may even be gone from that yard by this point, I still consider her spirit, within the larger spirit of Willow, to be my friend. I have a good relationship with the whole family of Willow, wherever I go, with specific Willow friends in many cities and along country roads where I have pulled over and stopped the car, or departed from the footpath, to hug and greet these beautiful, gentle, healing trees. I made friends with the Willow on Allston Way in Berkeley when I lived near there, and would go visit her frequently, making full moon tinctures from the bark of her withes. There is a gorgeous willow above a gazing pool in Mountainview Cemetery in Piedmont where I go to commune with the dead water women and make wishes. There is one in the middle of a cow pasture in Occidental that I can't touch because she's on private property, but I gaze upon her each time I am on that lonely road and feel her comforting arms reaching out to me on the breeze. There is one in Avebury, England, that took my breath away, which I long to visit again.

Willow is known for many magical and practical purposes, and from a quick look at the lore, it is easy to see why she is quite a historical favorite among witches and other practitioners of folk spirituality as well as those who practice organized religions. Robert Graves writes in The White Goddess that Willow is sacred among the early Jews, who celebrated a festival called Day of Willows. The Willow is associated with the Underworld in Greek myth, particularly sacred to Hekate, Hermes, and Persephone, but also to Hera and Zeus. Myth proposes that a Willow grew outside the cave on Crete where Zeus was born. Willow makes a strong fiber and her bark eases pain. The dramatic majesty of her trailing, sighing branches are a haven for those who speak the language of trees and hear the music of the wind. She is the tender granny to children who build forts, sing the afternoons away, and play hide-and-seek among her locks. Paul Beyerl reports that, "planting a willow during your lifetime is said to protect you when taking final leave of your body. The willow (or direct descendant through a cutting) must be thriving at your death."

Lingering cough: thou art my nemesis.

Whenever I catch a cold or some associated respiratory illness, it almost invariably moves into my lungs. Ten years of smoking nearly a pack of cigarettes per day earlier in my life have left my lungs more vulnerable than other parts of my body, and those germs just love to move in and rough things up. I developed this cough syrup recipe because taking commercial cough syrup for several weeks at a time is really hard on my body. I'm one of those people who gets jittery and uncomfortable from dextromethorphen hydrobromide.

Since cold season is upon us with the children's return to school (a veritable shopping mall of germs where everything is, unfortunately, free) and the first cooling changes in the weather, I thought others might want to try this project at home. Please let me know how it works for you.

This time last year, I was looking for somewhere fun to take my sweetie Albert for his birthday. We ended up heading up to Chico for the World Music Festival there. It was a really fun weekend and I highly recommend the event for those who like diverse music and don't like huge crowds. It's smaller and more intimate than other festivals I've attended, and I really felt like I got to connect more with the performers, vendors, and other attendees.

While we were visiting for the festival, an open-air market was happening just outside of town in the more rural farming community where the almond growers make their trade. This was a proper "Hoes Down" kind of affair that felt like a throwback to the festivals of my youth in upstate New York, with folks selling their handmade quilts and rag rugs and knit items, jewel-toned jars of homemade jam and pickles, whimsical yard decor, and a classic car show. I grew up going to events like these in the rural areas around my small hometown of Olean. It was fun to touch that country energy again. Urban farmer's markets in the Bay Area, with highbrow marketing, rapid turnaround, thronging crowds and long lines, are fun and exciting, but they are not quite like these homespun, slow-moving events. Different birds altogether.

I passed a booth where an elderly man was selling a small selection of preserved foods: pickled peppers, beans, and cucumbers. I had been hoping to find a pickled bean vendor, as spicy dill beans are among my favorite snacks. I stepped in to the booth and inquired after a jar of beans: how much? Spicy or not?

Last week I yearned for the refrigerator pickles my mom used to make when I was small, so I made up a big batch, slightly altering the recipe. I tend to like them sweet and sour and dill all at the same time. I brought them to a party and they were a big hit there, as well as around my house. Super simple. Enjoy!

Begin: boiling water and pouring it into your pickling jars to sit while you mix up the recipe. At the last minute, dump out the water and pour the pickles in before refrigerating.

You will need:

My friend Andrea Young first taught me a version of this drink, and the recipe has morphed a bit since then. It is a perfect cooler for your 4th of July celebrations, or just for long, hot days. Replaces vitamins, quenches thirst, and provides gentle internal cleansing. If you are less interested in the health benefits and just want a hip new twist on the Cape Cod to serve at your party, mix vodka into this and enjoy :)

You will need:

1 bottle of unsweetened cranberry juice

Happy Solstice! While today and tonight are the actual Solstice, on June 23 we celebrate St. John's Eve and on June 24 St. John's Day, which are hugely important for folk herbalists.

Likely a Christian adaptation of the pre-existing Summer Solstice festivals, St. John's Eve honors midsummer with bonfires and herbal customs. The phenomenally powerful herbal ally St. John's Wort (hypericum perforatum, internally taken as an anti-depressant, internally and externally applied as a potent anti-bacterial/anti-viral) blooms right around this time each year, turning beautiful yellow flower-faces to the Sun.

On St. John's Eve, venture into the garden at midnight and gather your St. John's Wort flowers. Allow them to dry, flat on cookie racks or a baking sheet lined with a linen towel, for a day or so. Then, loosely chop and place the flowers, leaves, and stems in a jar. Cover with olive oil, jojoba oil, or your favorite other skin-friendly oil. Place the jar in a sunny window or on an outdoor altar for a few weeks, shaking gently on a daily basis. The oil will deepen into a wonderful shade of red. The depth of the red color, in Polish folklore, is indicative of how much love surrounds the maker of the oil. After a few weeks, strain this oil and use it topically as a moisturizing and cleansing oil for topical skin conditions. I typically mix in some comfrey root, peppermint leaf, calendula flower, and lavender flower as well, and the resulting oil is my all-purpose treatment for itchy skin, healing wounds, scars, eczema, and for softening rough spots.

The eye sees only what the mind is prepared to comprehend.
- Henri Bergson

Can you believe your eyes? As those of us who are bespeckled know, the answer to that question is complicated. If I have my glasses on, I can see long distances & movie screens, read street signs, notice fine detail in the curve of someone’s neck or the slight flare of a nostril. However, when I do not have my glasses on, I am nearly blind in my left eye (and right now, I don’t have my glasses on. I left them in a Starbucks bathroom on a road trip last weekend, and my second pair is...somewhere? So I am squinting at you right now, through the monitor, looking every bit like a suspicious witch peering through a hole in the door.)

One of my unsought, unasked-for Initiations in this life: my soul traded the ability to see out of my left eye with for the ability to see quite a lot with my third eye. I count this fair.

There are many ways to “see.” I was born with poor vision, and started wearing my first pair of glasses at age 3. They were green. I graduated to blue glasses, then tortoiseshell glasses, then red glasses, then wire frames. But by the time I was about 15, my vanity overtook me and I peeled those glasses off. I was tired of being called “4 eyes” and having people say things to me like, “boys don’t make passes at girls with glasses.” So I stuffed them into my bureau and pretended to forget about them.