Talk With Your Hands
Our fall collection of herbal goods & medicine is rooted in & pays homage to my Sicilian ancestors ~ the contadinas, or peasant farmers ~ the way they lived reciprocally with the land & the traditional herbalism they practiced. Though I don’t ever intend to be chauvinist in my ways, my work is very much rooted in these ancestral practices. Talking with my hands is something that’s always connected me to my ancestors and has taken on new meaning as I’ve grown.
I came to herbalism as an artist, craftswoman, and witch ~ and practicing with herbal medicine also immediately led me to growing. So needless to say, all of my work is handwork and I very much talk with my hands in all senses ~ believing it’s what you do with your hands that matters most, representing what you make and put out into the world. People’s tendency, across cultures, to talk with their hands demonstrates an understanding of each other, energy, and knowledge of self, more than we acknowledge, showing us that there is no true separation of mind from body ~ we are one complete system and our medicine should complement that.
Historically its thought that this form of body language came about during periods of oppression, where cultures, and especially the poor people of said cultures would communicate in gestures in order to keep their communication secret from their rulers. Manual labor, or getting your hands dirty, so to speak, is the work that sustains our lives here on earth. The hands that tend our crops and sew our clothes are so often taken for granted and devalued in our current economic structure.
The focus of my work may not be easy, but it is simple ~ to get as close to the source as possible, and to ultimately be the source & encourage others to be their own source as well. The abundance that comes from a garden as small as the one I tend now, is more than what I need, and so I share it in the form of handcrafted offerings, because I know there are so many people without access to even the little bit of land I have access to. But my goal is not to grow my client base into anything huge, to make an unreasonable profit off your need to be healthy, or make offerings you’re dependent on buying. It is to share the information & tools to help you cultivate your own garden, your own medicine ~ to help us all get back the freedom to do what we want, produce what we need, and to ultimately cultivate a more just world where all people talk with their hands ~ and get to experience that connection we all so desperately long for.
Love,
Sam