***

Since this spring of 2020 I have been more concertedly trying to follow Plantago Major through an apprenticeship in traditional western herbalism as a part of my master’s fieldwork. When I received  feedback on my research proposal from Abrah, the herbalist with whom I apprentice, she alerted me to the fact that plantain is particularly responsive to vibration, adding that it is understood as snake medicine. Snakes too, she noted, were sensitive to vibrations transmitted through the earth. She awakened me to the reality that this plant grows on waysides as though it were drawn to the footfalls and rumblings of those who pass.  Indeed plantain has often been associated with pathways and this I knew, but I have nonetheless had to think for sometime with the notion that the plant is drawn to vibration. 

In North America Plantain took on the name of White Man’s Footsteps as it spread with colonial disturbance; similarly in the 9 herbs charm cited above, it is translated from Anglo Saxon as “Waybread”( Pettit 2001 in Wyrtig). Wolf Storl notes that Plantain favoured the compacted roadways where it found less competition, and where its seeds, sticky when wet, might be easily carried onwards (2017, 114). He further suggests that the plant proliferated in the neolithic era as cereal production increased, a time when road networks had yet to be developed: “cult roads led from the village of the living to the chambers of the grave barrows, or burial mounds where the departed ancestors lived” (Strol 2017: 116). Along these roads plantain, or waybread, withstood the passing cartloads of the dead, and hooves of cattle and ox.  It led, in a literal sense, to the subterranean realm of the dead, and was said “to avert the transition to the other world” (Strol 2017: 117). Indeed its astringency is still used for wounds, to staunch blood, to pull tissues together or to help expel and pull out infection or venom. Now as intestinal disorders plague the industrialized amoung us, as human intestines find themselves ravaged by round-up ready cereals and hither too unseen environmental contaminants, plantain is used commonly to calm and soothe the intestine, to both dry and moisten irritated and inflamed tissues. People have been using it similarly now in treatments for Covid-19, finding it offers relief to lungs ravaged by the virus.

Abrah once said, as a group of us gathered around the plantain in her lawn that, “plantain clings to the earth”. In the bits of Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) I have picked up in my short herbalist education, the earth element rules digestion and assimilation. It is associated with the spleen and said to manifest often in care-work and the taste of sweetness. Here its affiliation with the gut makes some sense.  Indeed little differentiates shit from soil- only time and microbes. So just as feet trudge onward and carts roll the dead to burial, so too does shit decompose.  All the while plantain makes seeds that get sticky when wet: here rhythmic cycles begin to emerge with earth as intermediary. Like Ingold’s cling-y, whorling knots there is a cyclical nature to the coalescing and dispersal of rhythm- indeed nothing clings and whirls forever (2015, 3 & 7). Vibrations that coalesce into rhythm also dissipate. Sometimes though we can adjust, correspond, attune.

***

I found myself repeatedly confronted with the notion of vibration where it concerns the taking and preparation of flower essences, sometimes called vibrational essences. The near homeopathic dilutions have been more difficult for me wrap my head around.  If herbal medicine inhabits a spectrum that stretches from the scientific to new age woo, flower essences are deep in the woo. Indeed despite long medical traditions of understanding health in relation to sonority and vibration (Gouk 2017, 5), this is a place I have had to reach in and work through some skepticism and confusion.  In both 2018 and 2019 I attended the Heartwood gathering, a herbalist conference near Port Hope Ontario. Both times I attended sessions about flower essences.

At the first workshop we were asked to drink a blended mix of fresh green plants, lemon and honey in order to raise our vibration. It was explained to us that the earth’s vibration was rising, and that ours must too. It seemed almost that this was collectively accepted, though this did not feel intuitively evident for me. We then meditated for a time with a blindly selected card affiliated with one of Edward Bach’s 38 Flower essences. We did so without looking at the card while the workshop facilitator prepared our bottles of essence. We eventually looked at our cards and discussed our experiences in groups.  We then meditated again, now with the essence itself – either used externally or internally. We shared our experiences again in the same group.

I spoke with the facilitator afterward.  I had enjoyed the workshop and was curious about the information she had shared about Edward Bach and his own impetus to leave the laboratory behind and offer living holistic medicine (Penselin 2017, 4).  She had indicated that Bach’s assertion that dew drops held the same vibration as the plants served as the basis for his essences which differed from homeopathy in offering light rather than more darkness into the healing process.  I asked her about making flower essence, or using plants other than the 38 proposed by Bach and commercially available. Her stance was clear: it was not necessary to make them as they needed to be processed with the right intention, and all that was needed could be contained with his original 38 commercially produced essences. She counselled against the DIY approach.

The workshop I attended in 2019 was however totally different and was structured more as a ritual. We were outside in a circle. The facilitator had a crystal bowl in the centre full of spring water. She had us pray to the sun and the ground, to form a triangle around our third eye and touch it to the ground. Eventually we were ushered out of the circle to find a plant, to sit with it, to bring a piece of it back, or simply to breathe in its vibration.  We returned to the circle and one by one added the  plant or breath-vibration into the bowl. With each addition the bowl was tapped so that it rang, resonating outward. We each uttered one word to it. We stayed with the essence until released. Later we were each offered small bottles of the essence we had made.  I spoke with this facilitator as well about making essences and the commercially produced Bach flowers.  She too was clear: the commercial Bach flowers were now manufactured by Pepsi, absolutely we should make our own. This knowledge, she insisted, is older than Bach.

This summer, leaning into my own hesitancy, I made my own essences, including one of plantain. My mother had given me small multicoloured crystal shot-glasses some time ago, no doubt for their aesthetic appeal more than their envisioned contents, but they were perfect for making small quantities of essence.  I filled one with spring water from the Wakefield spring, and after sitting with the plant for a time I carefully -so as not to touch the plantain flowers and disrupt their vibrations with my own- snipped them with sheers into the little glass. Some have said that plantain’s subtle flower resembles a snake’s head -a signature indicating its use.  The flowers were tender, comprising pale green stalks dotted with small buds -soon to emerge with petals- all neatly stacked and spiralling upward like miniature honeycomb to a slender rounded tip. Sturdy, but delicate. I placed the shot-glass with its precious contents in the centre of the plant so that they might vibe together- this is what books had suggested after-all. I then continued about my garden duties, drawn into other rhythms and frequencies.  I returned later to see the shot glass spilled, though not entirely.  At this I chuckled, it was a dry hot summer and of course the moisture loving plantain would be thirsty. Given its tendency to be in the way, odds were good for some spillage.  Dirt had got in too, again this seemed appropriate.  I returned the flower stalks to the plant and mixed the infusion with brandy to preserve it.  Even the brandy I somehow managed to spill and accidentally add in excess.

  I have now taken the essence several times, finding it to be among the more potent and immediately effective of the many that I have made.  Despite some of my skepticism, it seems to create a sense of internal space around the intestines and lungs, I feel myself pull backward, my neck relaxed, as if my body were opened and more firmly on the ground. This differs for instance from the Tobacco flower essence which sends chills up my arms and neck, or Belladonna which seems without fail to pull my head up toward the sun. With Plantain’s essence something in me shifts and makes space.  In these encounters I am altered in a manner altogether familiar and recognizable.  The vibrational essences seem to bring internal movement akin to that that which might potentially be evoked by dance, and my own intentional physical movements entailing breath, stretch, force, balance and release.

***

And so we have arrived at the dance.  Why dance? Never in my research proposal did I discuss dance, a fact I might now see as a kind of oversight.  I had suggested instead that I might draw plants, though I have not really been calm, collected and composed enough through the tumult of this pandemic to feel much like drawing.  In practice it too closely resembles writing and reading.  It demands concentration, stillness as well as containment, and in truth I need to move.  Sometimes, the feeling overwhelms me and sends me running out the door into the experimental farm 2 blocks from my home. My dog, Ursa, is slow and so I loop around her, stretching my arms up and outward when I need to.  Often my arms have been too poised, too still and ready to appease the operational requirements of my computer’s screen. Dodging tree roots, I quicken my pace with Ursa’s own occasional excitement, and pause with her need to sniff, to slow down in the fullness of the summer heat, and sometimes for the sake of her occasionally achy front elbow, my run sometimes is little more than a walk weaving, perhaps hoping side to side.  I greet the white pines as we pass, touching their bark, noticing the squirrels, the plants, the mushrooms as they shift with the seasons. It is this kind of dance that is needed in these moments.

More than rote daily exercise, my daily run-walk-dance feels continuous in many ways with my weekly contemporary dance classes, which I have faithfully stuck with now through these many months of the pandemic. We gather on zoom, so that now my instructor Natasha is teleported onto my screen.  I follow her queues as I have for most Tuesday nights these last few years.  She sits atop my barbecue in the back yard while I dance on the weedy withered lawn, the dry dwindling grass beneath my feet, the cottonwood rustling above. I reach right toward the belladonna, oat and plantain, and the left toward the apple and raspberry.  It was Natasha who suggested I do a movement prayer, a filmed weekly performance or offering of simple movements- no more than 4 minutes- that she has been faithfully offering up on her own since quarantine began.

It was serendipity calling I realized; a good opportunity to think with plantain.  I had recently encountered the 9 herbs charm, and something in its rhythm was compelling.  Not so much a prayer, appealing upward to a supposed deity, but the repetitive recitation of a charm seeming to evoke lateral movement; to compel a reminder of the strength that already is, and to create presence through re-iterative incantation. Indeed it states:

Sing that charm on each of the herbs

thrice before he prepares them and on the apple also .

and sing into the
mouth and into both ears and on the wound

that same charm before he puts the salve on that.

(Pettit 2001).

The movements selected were then repetitive and in some senses banal. Reminiscent of many of the habitual movements I revisit on Tuesday nights, and  throughout the week here and there when I feel the need. While potentially mundane, the movements evoke and manifest strength, and so I used them in service of the plantain, a plant that while mighty, is also commonplace in its abundance. Here there is some of Gregory Bateson’s sense of habitual redundancy.  This he describes as a common trait of communication generally, but one which in Balinese art and society gestures through the paradoxical mutual dependancy even of supposed polar opposites (Bateson 1972, 147). Pulling breath inward, pulling upward, drawing down, reaching laterally, whirling too…all might have seemingly crescendoed and diminished as might a life – vegetal or otherwise.  This however paradoxically evokes constance in its cyclicality too. Here then is a salve for troubled times, a kind of  attunement that might evoke the harmony and balance of music “perceived as pleasurable to the soul” (Gouk 2017, 9 & 5).

In terms of location I had more distant spots in mind. I visited them, but sometimes there was no plantain, it being a hot and dry year in some ways unfavourable to the plant.  Other spots were so much in the way that they were not conducive to a filmed performance, outdoor space now being at a premium as indoor spaces have suddenly become dangerous. I tried setting up the camera in one spot near to a small patch of the plant, but the light and angle simply didn’t work. I realized that the best spot is the driveway of my parent’s home in Quebec, not the deeper woods nor the now busier than ever paths of Ottawa’s experimental farm. As I wove the half-choreographed sequences around the driveway, camera propped up against my car, I became aware of how the sounds of domesticity coloured the soundscape of the dance- of plantain’s habitat. Voices from the kitchen, a motor… soundscape serves as soundtrack.  Visually too, there is no hiding the compost bin; I am in the way, literally in the driveway. Here amidst the most compacted of soils the plantain grows, alongside some others.  Here in whirls of new growth and possibility, winding and unwinding as they might through soil and air (Ingold 2015, 57). 

***

In the end, I cannot straightforwardly follow the plantain, not really. Just as rigid notions of exterior and interior representation must give way to the subtler rhythms of interplay between performer and shifting communal demands in Motta’s conceptualization of theatre, so too will strict dichotomizations of who is following who in this dance simply fall through (2013, 141). The truth is that I summon this  plant with my own footsteps, I invoke it, charmed as it is by the rhythmic strike of my walk, the rumblings of my tires.  It digs in, undoing my compaction only to have me follow again.  It was Julie who said as much to me, her voice raised as the river thundered onto the rocks around us “it is trying to follow you, but you are following it”. I have yet to be dashed apart, as waybread is suggested to do in the Anglo-Saxon 9 herbs charm, but the potential conundrum remains. Nevertheless, in following plantain I summon it and further recreate its seemingly preferred state of being. Here there is perhaps not so much a conundrum as a potential plateau – a possibility for stability, something akin to the non-schismogenic art forms described by Gregory Bateson (1972,  120 & 124). So too does the dance then evoke the entredeux of plantain and me as walker, breather. I breathe, I walk, but also I whorl outward as does the plantain, to both the sky and the ground. Without roots I cannot undo compaction as it does, but instead I offer my heartbeat that our vibrations might be entrained to one another (Motta 2013, 157), that in this sense I might too unwind and enter the soil just as the plantain’s new life force might be carried along on my feet and through my gut. In this sense we orbit one another forming a knot (Ingold 2015), a resonance that echoes and reverberates into the ether of a musical cosmos (Laplante 2020; Gouk 2017, 68).