A delicious rush of eros-energy flooded my body when I made my first flower essence. A holistic practitioner had asked me to make an essence from the Datura plant. Little did I know that my friend’s request would spark thirty years of deep immersion into Nature’s mysteries that became a business called Raven Essences.

Creating a flower essence involves intuitive listening for a ‘definition’ of each plant’s unique energy and its subtle healing properties. My encounter with the Datura proved to be personally prophetic. Here’s the definition that eventually emerged:

A hallucinogenic plant used by shamans, Datura encourages visions stimulated by the dynamic interplay between our bodies and nature’s primal intelligence. Rising from our feminine psyche through dreams, body-symptoms and intuitive feelings, these visions are partly the voice of the sacred earth speaking through our bodies. While these perceptions often challenge the status quo by throwing us temporarily into creative chaos, Datura helps us honour the creative void and integrate body-encounters with the dynamic energies of nature as an essential part of our humanity.

Listening to plants did throw me into an intensely creative chaos as I began making dozens of essences from other flowers in my garden. At first, I only heard snippets of information: Hibiscus — mature femininity…; Aconitum — courage to enter darkness…; Zinnia — spontaneity and quantum creativity…; Clematis — creating sacred space.

Jotting down these tidbits of wisdom, I became a dedicated scribe, intensely energized by the sensuosity of this information. Compelled to listen through my whole body, I grounded my energy deep into the earth, slowed my breath, softened my gaze, and opened my heart. Later I realized that I was being trained, not just by the individual plants, but by the spirit of Nature Herself. Over the years, my listening abilities blossomed into intuitive consultations with clients, workshops, sacred gatherings as well as many other writings received in communion with Gaia.

Last summer when I was meditating on my verandah, I heard “Go deeper…” I can do that, I thought, but was taken aback when I then heard, “Six feet under…”  Yikes — this is where we put dead bodies! Continuing to listen, I then heard, “This is where a Great Organizing Tenderness lives.”

Letting go of Raven Essences

Not long after this meditation, and thirty years after the start of the Raven Essence project, I began to disperse all of the 350 essences. While several external factors contributed to this decision (tariffs to the States and a prolonged postal strike in Canada) it was my intuition, coupled with a weariness of body and soul and some minor health issues, that convinced me it was time to let them go.

This was not a casual decision, for I had steadfastly nurtured this project with curiosity and deep devotion. As I recorded the essence of each flower, the creative alchemy deepened my intuitive listening skills with Nature and eventually served my work with hundreds of clients. Letting go of this massive collection needed to be done with careful tenderness.

I took one essence at a time, held the small blue bottle and sensed where it wanted to go on the property. My land is near a large ravine and includes many deciduous and evergreen trees, two rivers of stones, brick pathways as well as the large garden beds. Intuitively sensing each location, I walked to the area, poured a few drops of the essence onto my palm and held it up to the sun. Then I kneeled, placed the palm of my hand with the warm essence onto the ground, and offered a silent prayer. “May this energy permeate Gaia’s heart.” After emptying the rest of the bottle onto the land, I paused to witness what might have subtly shifted in the atmosphere and made brief notes about what I perceived.

It took weeks to disperse all the mother tinctures, and I still had hundreds of solution bottles to empty as winter quickly approached. Tuning in again, I was given a new choreography. Over five days around the 2025 winter solstice, I poured the remaining essences into a large crystal bowl, then sounded it. Sacred sound had been part of the creation of all the essences. Then I gingerly carried the bowl out through the snow to the garden’s sanctuary and poured it over the sculpture of the headless maiden.

Wintering

To honor this massive shift, the ending of a major part of my formative identity, I decided to retreat for the winter. It was the perfect dark time to be quiet and go to ground. I filled my days by making thousand-piece puzzles, sorting books and re-reading journals, taking long walks and sight-reading Bach Preludes. I also slept a lot, partly because my body needed the rest, but also because I was restless and bored. I didn’t know what to do with myself or what creative impulses to trust.

As spring now approaches and this slowed time draws to a close, everything in and around me is shifting. Familiar patterns no longer feel automatically right, while other innovative possibilities are not clearly formed. The world is in crisis with war in the Middle East, a president spiraling out of control, prices rising, homelessness and violence everywhere, not to mention the swiftly accelerating climate crisis that threatens to rip the ground out from beneath us all. I sense it is time to let something totally unique and congruent with the times emerge from within the mush of this personal darkness.

Listening to the Heart of the Earth 

Twenty-two years ago, in 2004, I wrote 120 poems in quiet intimacy with Gaia. Each morning, I placed a few drops from one of the Raven flower essences on my tongue and entered a meditative state while briefly sounding to create a corridor between my heart and Gaia’s voice. The words flowed effortlessly…

While you insist on independent strength,
I long to be included in your life, your work, your art.
All would be so different if you invited
birdsong, tree-sap and whale bone into your planning.
Take me to your boardrooms.
I wither as commodity.

This past autumn, I was once more guided to intuitively commune with Gaia. This time She presented herself through different voices, and with a more somber tone than what I heard in 2004. These excerpts are from three of her current expressions: She who will not, She who aches, and She who holds the balance.

I have my limits. While personal indignities are forgivable, widespread and systematically power-driven agendas are swiftly reaching a tipping point. You assume power is yours to wield because you have man-made tools, but this is a dangerous forgetting of the gift of life you have been given. Any power that you assume is yours can be swept away in seconds.

I may withdraw and cease to comply as a self-defense measure, or I can lash out. Both actions – withholding and disrupting — are vacillating within me. The reverberating intensification within my core is recalibrating with the cosmos in ways you scarcely comprehend!

While some people are becoming more aware of how my life force operates in what is left of the natural world, balance is not achieved through reactionary course-corrections. Actions based on fear or greed only complicate the restorative process and contaminate the future.

Alarmed by the dramatic tone of these messages, I questioned the accuracy of my listening and buried them for a time, sharing them with no one. Then, as the crises in the world continued to escalate, I re-read them, wondering whether something had shifted within Gaia, in terms of her tolerance or capacity to survive our onslaughts. Perhaps my intuitive abilities needed to deepen to receive new information that was not as gentle and supportive as what I had received in the past. Then I recalled that some of the 2004 poems also contained a sense of urgency.

This poem is clearly a rebuke:

You have suckled at my breast taking everything you wanted,
but I am not your mother only.
Release me from this ancient bond.
Neither do I linger in old groves of worship
for those vessels now are cracking.
Be with me in creation’s dark womb.
Free your fear from its small cage.
Our work begins in darkness.

Meanwhile this one seems to be a cautionary warning:

I am gathering myself as a tiger contracts before springing.
Breathe with me.
My slowly gathering power is churning the restlessness in you.
Stay with me, do not run away as I prepare to move.

However, this is the poem that always perplexed me. While I struggled to make sense of it then, I could not leave it out:

Hear the weeping that courses through a great fault line in my body.
I want this wound to become a purple song.
I must sing this, but your body may not bear it.
My purple song would change you completely.
Still, this is my heart’s yearning – to sing the purple song.

Twenty-two years later, I ask myself again: what is this purple song, this Earth-wound that our bodies “may not bear”? My answer is raw and incomplete, for the purple song remains a living mystery, both subtle and immensely powerful. Gaia’s purple song suggests a massive realignment, an entire shift in frequencies. Will it manifest as devastation accompanied by a howl of grief or the birth of new life with a great roar of love and beauty?

Writing these words now, with tears and a cracked-open heart, I feel the purple song sweeping through every cell in my body. As I weep, I imagine the same force moving through and altering everything on earth. It feels more devastating than a nuclear bomb and, at the same time, more life-giving than I can possibly imagine. I know of only one energy that can cause such massive change. And that force is Love.

The Black Egg Returns

Near the start of the Raven Essence-creation process, I had a dream with one word spoken: obsidian, a word I didn’t know. Looking it up, I learned that obsidian is volcanic glass, flowing out as lava from the bowels of the earth.

At a local rock shop, I found a beautiful obsidian egg. Holding the jet-black stone up to the light, I was astonished to see shimmers of gold throughout its dark interior. It was the perfect reflection of where I was then — amid a precarious descent from years of disembodied spiritual aspiration into the dark mysteries of my body and soul. Flecked with gold, the black egg was a fertility symbol for the shift I needed to make from my heavy investment in a patriarchal cult into the uncharted landscape of my own feminine nature.

The obsidian egg dream has now come full circle, with new resonance. My work continues — to enter the darkness and look closely, without fear or projection, for the gently shimmering lights. To feel the ache, the profound pain of the world, both Gaia’s and humanity’s, and let it open my heart even wider to love.

Next to the broken and the dying,
There is always something whole.

This sentence, from one of Gaia’s 2004 poems, is a poignant reminder for each of us to look beyond the turmoil, and it is also an invitation to sink six feet under, into that Great Organizing Tenderness.

Entering A New Season

As spring approaches and my fallow-wintering time recedes, one phrase keeps haunting me: “Islands of Coherence…” I hear it when I wake, when I stroll down my driveway, when I am making tea or doing laundry. Like an earworm, it simply won’t leave me alone.

Nobel laureate Ilya Prigogine referred to islands of coherence as small, organized pockets of stability, connection, and shared intention that emerge within larger, chaotic, or unstable systems. These ‘islands’ have the potential to orient turbulent systems—such as broken social structures or volatile environments—toward higher order and balance.

Is this a hint about where I am to place my energy and attention? If so, what is my role? For now, I will continue to listen, beneath the surface dramas, to the pulsing patterns of that Great Organizing Tenderness, for how new islands of coherence might surface this spring.

What holds the world together is a field of love called Home.
Your cells remember this primal place and seek it every day.
Yet home is not all comfort.
When familiar beauty fades, I am with you still,
In the decomposing bone, the melt of glaciers,
Searing fire, the slow grind of stone on stone.
This is the fullness of our song.
Let everything be welcomed Home.

Note: I want to thank Lise Weil and the editorial team of Dark Matter/Women Witnessing for creating such generous space for women’s essays, poems and art. The Journal always challenges, inspires, and invigorates the consciousness of humanity, while also serving as a balm for our aching planet.

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