I Love Rose Thorns. Also Hawthorn Thorns. I Keep A Few Of Each In A Little Jar, Just In Case I Need Them.

Making some seiðr/hedgeriding glycerite today. I love bearberry so much.

Seidr / Hedgeriding Tincture:

Bearberry - 90%

And:

Cedar

Wild rose petals & hips

Saskatoons

Burdock root

Elder flowers & berries

Horsetail

Rowan

Steep for a day or two in the fridge after tea is cooled.

Glycerin 60%

Tea 40%

This is oddly reassuring given the state of the world. Love a tree.

the trees you grew up with have not forgotten you. their branches still whisper your name in the breeze and their roots remember the paths your feet once traced through their shade.

Making some earth oil:

Canala Oil

Bearberry

Cocoa nibs

Burdock root

Plantain

Horsetail

Pineapple weed

Ground ivy

Black tourmaline

Steep for a few months.

Lovely combination and lovely way to end a ridiculous week.

It’s so exciting to be studying another language and then realise that you understood a complete sentence. And then another complete sentence. I realise they’re very basic sentences, but it’s just fun.

That’s a screenshot of the Sahlawayhi stories, level 2 on LingQ.

Overall, the Sahlawayhi stories were exactly what I needed in a graded reader and I'll read more in this series: the level is good and there's a lot of repetition. However, I could have done without all the racism and sexism in the last story. The way the male characters talk about Thai women was pretty gross. I'll reread the first three stories for more practice.

Sahlawayhi 2 is much the same as the first. Most of the stories are good for practice though one is about suicide. The repetitive vocabulary is very helpful, though.

La fille qui rêvait d'un bidon d'essence et d'une allumette est excellent. Idéal pour apprendre le français, et donne moi envie de vivre dans un monde dirigé par des femmes.

I’m reading a book of micro-memoirs by Beth Ann Fennelly and it’s a lot of fun so far.

Well, that was fun. Some of the early plot lines were a bit hard to follow and I did have to pull up the Wikipedia summary a couple of times but once it got to the Yuri and Lara story, it really got rolling, and the writing (or at least the translation) was beautiful, even if I didn’t always understand some of the characters’ choices. Some of the political conversations were pretty interesting too. I had distant relations that were sent to the gulags by Stalin so I have some opinions about that bit of history, but it was really enlightening to listen to various arguments from Russian characters by a Russian author.

Well, this is cool.

Recent world and personal events have me feeling really over it today. But lichens are still there. Lichens are always there. And they make it all worth it.

Stay safe, stay strong, stay around, and stay you, in spite of it all.

I’ve finally made elderberry syrup! The cinnamon and black cardamom give it a really nice depth. And I always love rosehips. I’ll save the reishi for something else.