Plarn = plastic yarn. ♻️ Made from recycled bags, bottles, and marine waste, it turns pollution into possibility—fiber strong enough to weave, knot, and sculpt into new stories.
I need this machine
St. Hildegard of Bingen: Mystic, Maker, Medicine Woman
St. Hildegard of Bingen (1098–1179) was a German mystic, composer, writer, healer, and abbess, one of the most remarkable women of the Middle Ages. A visionary and Doctor of the Church, she integrated spiritual insight with music, natural medicine, and ecological wisdom.
She authored major theological works based on her visions, composed over 70 original chants (writing both music and lyrics), and produced texts on healing, botany, and natural history. Hildegard’s holistic approach saw the body, mind, and spirit as deeply interconnected, and her remedies drew from plants, food, and elements of nature.
Lately, I’ve been immersing myself in her world listening to her celestial chants, reading her herbal remedies, testing her recipes, and studying her illuminations. Her work is more than historical, it feels like a living lineage, a call to remember the sacred intelligence of the body, the earth and spirit.
A fierce intellect and spiritual force, Hildegard spoke truth to power and left behind a body of work that still inspires mystics, artists, and healers like me today.
Weaving with Copper
The ways people dream, build, and reimagine the world around them constantly fill me with awe. Innovation is where wonder lives.
Salting Grief and Grace
In both Japanese funerary rites and Afro-Caribbean spiritual practices, salt is a sacred purifier, used to ward off evil spirits and cleanse the lingering energy of death. Whether sprinkled outside the home after a funeral or offered at an ancestral altar, salt marks the boundary between the living and the dead. I grew up throwing salt over my shoulder, into fire, or into moving water, a ritual of release and banishment, echoing traditions that span oceans and generations.
Illuminations and New Sight
Ever since I got my new reading glasses, I’ve been powering through my reading list with fresh eyes, literally and spiritually. This morning, I finished Illuminations by Mary Sharratt, a luminous novel about Saint Hildegard von Bingen, the 12th-century mystic, composer, healer, and visionary.
Her story is so inspiring. Hildegard’s fierce devotion to divine creativity, her bold voice in a patriarchal world, and her communion with the natural world, echo so much of what I’ve been reaching for in my own practice. Her visions, wild, vivid, unapologetically feminine, remind me that there is sacred power in speaking what only you can see.
Hildegard’s legacy is a radiant thread in the life I’m building now, of ritual, plant medicine, and ancestral memory. I didn’t expect a book to shift my inner tempo, but Illuminations has done just that. More soon. There’s work to do in the garden.
Theda
The Saman Tree Speaks
There’s a Saman Tree at Sky Garden Retreat that has been calling out quietly for years.
Its wide, sheltering canopy hums with memory. Its roots grip the land like knuckles holding on to something sacred. When the wind moves through its branches, it feels like a whisper, like someone long gone is trying to tell me something important.
This tree is not just a tree. It is a witness. A keeper of stories. A sentinel for the land and the lives that have passed through it.
I’ve invited the team from the Black Heritage Tree Project to visit Sky Garden and meet the Saman Tree for themselves. They are here on St. Croix mapping and honoring the trees that have borne witness to Crucian history, especially the brutal and beautiful legacy of Black freedom, survival, and spirit.
There’s also an old gravity-fed well tucked into the ghut below, mostly hidden now by vines and time. But it’s there. Like the tree, it’s part of a story that refuses to be forgotten.
I don’t know everything this tree has seen, but I know how it makes me feel: grounded, protected, watched over. I know that when I stand beneath its limbs, I feel connected to something much older than myself, something enduring.
This visit isn’t about documentation alone. It’s about reverence. Listening. Remembering. And sharing space with something ancient that still lives and breathes beside us.
If you’ve ever loved a tree, you know what I mean.
Can Can Dig It? Yes, You Can
This is dope! I kind wish I had made it
Peel Off Paint… What the
Have you seen this before?
There’s something deeply satisfying about revealing what’s hidden underneath. The textures, the ghost marks, the traces of past gestures—they all come forward in unexpected ways. It’s like the surface tells its own story once you lift the top layer away.
Rethinking Hair Mats: From Cleanup to Concept
I’m fascinated by the use of felted hair mats to clean up oil spills—how something as intimate and personal as human hair can so effectively absorb environmental damage. There’s a quiet poetry in that gesture of care and restoration.
Listening Like a Plant in St. Croix
Michael Pollan’s The Botany of Desire: A Plant’s-Eye View of the World reframes how we see the green world around us—not as passive, cultivated objects, but as active participants in shaping our desires. It’s a perspective that lingers long after the last page, especially here in St. Croix, where the land hums with quiet intelligence.
Pollan’s invitation to view plants as co-creators made me reconsider the medicinal herbs growing wild across my property. Guinea hen weed curling through the underbrush. Lemongrass swaying in the trade winds. Turmeric pushing up in my raised planters. These plants aren’t just there. They arrive, they signal, they speak—if we’re willing to listen.
What if these plants are already in conversation with us, guiding us to notice where balance is needed, where healing is overdue?
Since reading the book, I’ve begun to move more slowly through the land, letting my hands hover before touching, asking inwardly before harvesting. I’m starting to feel that these plants are not just medicine for the body, but memory-keepers, storytellers, and perhaps, old friends with lessons still unfolding.
In St. Croix, where ecological wisdom is hiding in plain sight, The Botany of Desire offers a gentle challenge: to listen more deeply, to be in relationship, not just use.
What might change if we all listened like the plants do—rooted, attentive, and open to what the land is trying to say?
