Just a regular day of chores to clear and clean up. Those blackberries, horsetail and lemonbalm can take over. While cleaver’s seeds are sticky burrs. Then that known stickiness of family clinging to you. It is all felt in a robust day of clearing and cleaning.

Pruning: BlackBerry vines which I am trying to keep in check because… you know they can take over.
Uprooting: Horsetail and Lemon balm dug up by the wheelbarrow, space hogs.
This chore day was about thorns, tough dug in roots, of my ground squatters.
I had on my working bib overalls, leather gloves and a tough attitude. But a part of my softer side was exposed. My ankles! I came away with a cuff and sock filled with burrs. You know Cleavers and the seed burrs clinging. Clearly, this day as I am picking out dozens and dozens of buried burr seeds from my socks. Cleavers is giving me a shout.

Clinging like a Mom or cousin who just jumps into your space and grabs hold somehow. Cleavers can be a teacher of relationships. Cleavers grows up the back of other plants. Feeling that vibe lately? Cleavers. Look to Cleavers. If after an enmeshment with family you need a bodily cleansing. Cleavers! Cleavers engages the lymphatic system. Where our bodies do a good amount of our bodily clean out. Our body has a massively distributed lymph flow. It is our waters of exchange and flushing the body. Cleavers always laying on the back of other plants to reach it’s fullest potential. Have you felt you want to join with others? Do you feel to join in swaths of it growing? Cleavers - when cleavers is growing all together it creates a dead straw bed for deer or elk. An amazing plant which life dynamic can support our own relational dynamics. Feeling co-dependent? A body teacher can be Cleavers. Does it feel sometimes that ancestors are jumping on your back? Give Cleavers a try for clearing, cleaning and harmonizing in relationships.
Seeds of Cleavers — clever, subtle gotcha seeds.
As it is the season leading into our dying time of plants, receding tree juice, and thinning of ancestral veils. I feel the last passage of my own elders, my Dad, father-in-law and Aunt. The the last of my lineage all passed within a year somewhat recently. I am experiencing a threshold of change. A felt sense of changes between generations.
In this, I am feeling relief. Our ancestral struggle & ancestral ways have felt very needy clinging from generations of devastation. Creating our families life’s negotiation of gross but typical shadowlands.

My companion and I became change agents within our ancestor’s lineage. Our lives movements forced our hand and we maneuvered active release of burdens. Such as removing us from our given paths. We saw this rebounding devastation amidst strict white man’s Evangelical Christianity loaded with so much baggage. It is a mouthful even to say. It sure felt so. Back in the day, we left this Evangelical Baptist church. In fact, I was asked to leave (too many questions, and a female couldn’t be a church leader then,) and I firmly agreed… that I needed to leave.

My husband and I found (and still feel) that this change removed this distorted religious paradigm, as a world view, from the backs of our children, and their children. It wasn’t an easy movement to make. But I think the ancient ancestors were smiling.
We found we wanted to reinvent family. To release power of mutuality. In all sorts of ways. Removing the differences of what is old, what is young, what is man, what is woman, what is strong what is weak, and so on. We released our family onto even ground - when ever and where ever possible. The church and our society had fucked us up forcing what were some strict social norms and we had some healing to embrace.
And here we are decades later, having changed up beyond our plans and finding our way - way beyond our own considered intentions. The best intention was to be of no intention, rather trusting we will dance with whatever shows up.
We did not know what we were in for. We could not have known.
When we saw ways to support, we supported. When we could smell buckets of BS, we would call out the buckets of shit the other kept carrying. That mutual loving honesty thing. Deeply giving way to how we each moved and expressed, while change came to each in our own time. We kept asking what is mutual territory? How does it look and feel? Sometimes arguing what this is for me, for him! Each standing ground for what it needs to be. Not always in cadence with each other at all. But earnestness was deep in our hearts, giving us waters of grace and patience to swim in.
We didn’t make this happen. We did what was put in front of us, and tended to what had to be tended as best we could. We loved while in the underbelly of it all. It felt like the seeds of those who came before were stuck and needed plucked off or planted. There is a mixture of death/life/death in seeds. Seeds clinging to our lives. Our life’s go round seeded by the waves of life which was before us. Our elder’s who recently passed on, were caught in treacherous waters. Stuck in wicked quagmires. For all the love they could share, they were devastated more than I/we will ever know. To each we extend love, light and blessings beyond.

While we were conditioned through and with them, we have found we are not bound nor are we repeating their misery. They lived their good lives. In their way. And we have been moved otherwise while breaking given molds. Feeling liberated and healed. Knowing life transforms, transmutes and does all that crazy new life stuff. Sacred as life.
Their seeds are landing in the compost or in new soil. I feel here and now, with this threshold of elders passing, it is soil of fertile sacred grounds which the ancestors of way, way before knew.

Thank you Cleavers. When I need a language which is of the dark subterranean and that of our topside living, plants show up as teachers. Cleavers speaks to how the ancestor’s ways stick around. Sacred life death life IS. Their seeds will cling. But all that sticky stuck-ness can in some ways be just waiting for the ground of you. You express sacred and banal perfectly. Yup, just be you. May your relational waters be healing, in harmony, and be of clear waters generously flowing.
Oh cleavers as you stick on me, keep those ancestors smiling!
Give a think if you feel stuck. What aid are you bringing into your life? What plant are you allowing a partnership with to align you through body into fresh harmonies? I can support you. An astrology read can set a good understanding, coupled with herbs. Give me a shout through contacts. Check out my services. An art session can speak to what our minds are missing. Anyways… we all get stuck, have things stuck on us, it is our human nature.
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