Touching Summer: Making Healing Balms

The upcoming growing season is on the horizon and it's time to make sure that everything from the previous season is realized.  

This week we hand painted and labeled all of our 2013 honey jars.  Here is a photo from 2012's honey batch on a previous post.  

And we decanted all of our calendula oils and made balms.  As herbal medicine is the medicine of the people, the process of making balms is totally accessible and relishable. I wanted to offer a simple recipe which you will find below.  If you have questions let me know!  

Calendula Flowers

Calendula in Oil Sitting Sunside

A bit of strained Calendula Jojoba Oil                                   

Balm Making Session with the Lovely: Karen, Trevor & Jen.  Thank you!!!

  

Last bit of heart shaped beeswax melting in Calendula Oil

Step One: Gather Calendula Flower

Calendula flowers have beautiful seeds and take to the earth very easily.

Step Two:  Lay flowers out to dry for a day.  

Calendula's moist healing properties can lend themselves to encouraging mold.  

Drying them out a bit helps reassure a mold-free process!

Step Three: Place calendula flowers in a clean and dry glass container.  

Cover flowers in oil.  Let sit in a sunny spot until ready to use.  

If you were to look in a book for how to make an oil, it might recoommend to put calendula oil on a heat mat for 2-6 weeks.  

But before the time of heat mats, we had sunshine and I like the method of placing jars in a spot where it receives both the sun and moon.  

A greenhouse is a nice cozy spot as well.

There are many types of oil options. The oil you choose will be determined by your final product's intended use, 

as well as what oils happen to be in your home.   

In this batch I used a blend of cold-pressed organic olive oil and wildcrafted jojoba oil.  

Olive oil is highly nutritive, stable and an all-around good option and jojoba is a very stable oil, 

easily absorbed into the skin and a bit thinner than olive oil and so a nice option for a face balm.  

Step Four: Strain Oil into Clean Dry Glass Jar 

Don't forget to squeeze out the oil from the flowers

Step Five: Heat up Oil 

A double boiler system is fantastic, with a glass bowl over a pot with boiling water.  

Heat the oil on low heat

Step Six: Add beeswax & dissolve into Oil

I like to use for every 1 cup of oil, 1 ounce of beeswax.  If you don't have a scale you can slowly add beeswax, melting it in the oil, and taking a spoon to test samples to gauge if you need more wax.  We didn't have enough beeswax this year from the farm so we supplemented with wax from Healing Spirits  Herb Farm.  Thank you!!

Step Seven: Take off heat and add anything else.  

This blend will cool and solidify rapidly so this next step I like to do with some haste.  

Some ideas: Essential Oil: 5-10 drops to 1 ounce

Vitamin E

Step Eight: Pour into containers and let cool before sealing

Share & Enjoy!

Our Love as Everything

Hours before sunrise, we are shoveling and plowing
Bountiful Snow ~ waist high, thick, white
Everywhere.

The sun now showing, we recall it is another day of Love.
Today, Love meaning Space.

Space for the intense surge of devotion's pulsation,

rippling in waves and thunder and paradisal song. 

Space for mind's residing momentarily distinct,
and patient hearts waiting for remembrance of there,  
being no separation.

Space for sweetness & laughter and play.
Space for unknown karma.  The light and the darkest karma ~ so deeply personal, we can never explain entirely why in flashes our fires ignite~

This space we speak of is generous
It gratifies instantly
offering limitless potential to hold loves power.
How marvelous! to hold loves power!

& if love's energy is overwhelming ~ we extend.

Space for seeing our love as Everything.

Living Life from the Great Inside

I have been studying a lot over the years.  Bundles of glorious information on the vast capacity of being, as well as botanical medicine.  In the process I often devalue my innate knowing.  There is a place for knowledge passed down and shared, and a place for asking within for direction.  

Since the beginning we have asked for guidance.  When we have been at a loss, thrown, overwhelmed, we have asked Spirit, Goddess, God to show us the way.  We have laid our heads down and asked our dream world to offer us wisdom.  Nothing has changed.  This path of inner wisdom is eternally ours.

Since the beginning we have asked our plant world for guidance.  We have asked what is needed to bring back wholeness to ourselves or someone in our nation.  We have communicated from our soul to that same soul within the plant kingdom.  The deep inner to the deep inner.  Plants communicate through chemicals, light wavelenths and contact - putting out and receiving information from their environment.  From what we understand, they emit sounds waves through audio acoustic emissions.  And there is a world of plant communication, the mystical, the unknown that we cannot conceptualize. Yet our intuition recognizes that the universe of greenery works in subtle and powerful ways.  Many believe that when we step into the woods with a yearning for medicine, our clear intentions communicated can change a plants chemical compounds to make the perfect remedy requested.  I do trust this is possible, as plants shift their chemical make up for survival all of the time.

I am remembering this relationship.  The days when I am bewildered by my life decisions, bewildered by an imbalance in my system, I am remembering to ask the Great One to show me the way.  I am holding both the books of knowledge at hand as equally important as this inner world of knowing ~ connected across all beings:  land, human, animal, flora, bacterial and so on.

We often know what we need more than we allow ourselves to believe.

Now let us remember.
Let us step back in tuit
Asking spirit to guide the way.
Let us live life from the inside
Where the root and heart reside.