The Medicine of Spring — Healing by Choice!

by Marcia Lee

When you dwell in a frequency that feeds you, your frequency will naturally reset your authenticity. Remember, there is a difference between a person who has medicine and a person who is medicine. ~Malidome Patrice Some

Recently, when people ask me, “How are you feeling?”, I have been responding that I feel like spring this year: 60 degrees one day, snowing the next. Mornings that are sunny and afternoons that are snowing. This spring has been and, I think, will continue to be, one of great chaos, change, and transformation.

In the midst of these tremendous changes, the maple tree and her preparation for spring are medicine. When it is above freezing in the day time and below freezing at night, the sap runs. We often hear about maple sap for maple syrup, but sap is produced in more than maple trees.

*Maple trees in River Rouge Park that are a part of the sugar bush of Black to the Land*

“Filled with nutrients and minerals, sap is the blood of a tree. It carries energy out into the branches when new buds are forming in spring-time….a tree’s own sap can often serve as an effective defense mechanism.” (www.thetreecenter.com/what-is-tree-sap/)

The food for the trees is also its medicine. In the midst of all of the changes, the trees remind us of how we can be our own medicine and also benefit from the medicines of our community.

We have sliver maples in front of our house and have started a tradition of tapping the trees in the spring. This year, the neighbors helped us to tap the trees, including a 2 year old! It takes approximately 40 gallons of sap to make 1 gallon of syrup. We do not produce enough sap, nor have the capacity to make syrup; so instead, we drink the maple sap and share it with others! The maple sap or maple water then becomes nutrients and medicine for creating and building community.

*Big helpers on the block helping to set up our taps for the year*

In addition to building community, Maple water, loaded with electrolytes, adds crucial minerals to your body that give you the necessary “charge” to power through the day. (https://health.clevelandclinic.org/benefits-of-maple-water/). In order to access this medicine of spring, of trees, and of community, all we needed to do was walk out our front door, clear out the pith (middle) of an elderberry stick that we pruned, thank the tree and ask permission, drill a hole, and insert the elderberry stick into the drilled hole to ask as the spile.

For me, this is a reminder that, by moving with nature’s rhythms, listening, and being in community with all of my relations, I am able to fine tune my own frequencies through the frequencies around me. Through this practice, I become what already is.

What are the medicines around you? How are you the medicine that already is?