Flower Essences & Texts: Three Pairings by Moselle
"...cycles will churn, and meanwhile, by a window, cast in warmth, you compose a life."
Flower essences are subtle in size and, often, effects — that is, until they're not: spilling onto notebooks and nightstands; into dreams, your waking life. On the heels of Friday's New Moon in Cancer, this prompt for Moselle came at just the right time.
Lighten Up / Daybook, Anne Truitt
A tranquil, “dignity and a good name,” late summer for internal winter type pairing. By way of a similarly genteel backstory, Alaskan Essences founder Steve Johnson was a wilderness firefighter stationed in central Alaska, where, in response to the energetic potency of its terrain, together with several practitioners, he began developing a range of region-specific, flower and environmental essences and gem (mineral) elixirs. These are designed to instantiate and prolong encounters with the vast medicine of Alaska’s natural resources; Northern Lights, for example, draws on that phenomenon to get at its larger, conductive “role”, even for those who have never witnessed the Lights in person (though if you have, let me know how they compare). Steve passed away several years ago; his work continues stewarded by his wife, Judith, with some thoughtful guidance on how to select an essence offered here.
While essences are often best engaged for their individual gravitas, when I am in limbic overwhelm, I do like a more encompassing combination formula (think Rescue Remedy): Lighten Up includes Carnelian, Grass of Parnassus, Orange Calcite (a favorite for stirring creativity), and a distillation of Solstice Sun that seems to have a delayed release, though I sense it is the real kicker. The conversion of dark within to calm without feels palpable but effortless. It’s not a terribly loud essence, it may not have you elated and beaming. Its brightness is diffuse, tonal, and retrospective, operating with a relaxed timeframe for cleaning out and lifting up, as it addresses cellular congestion. It makes me think of bittersweet, dryly assuring, spare but generous, “American” writing. James Salter, Wendell Berry, and slightly afield, Anne Truitt. Truitt’s journals like Daybook and Yield (as standouts) are classic works of artistic reflection: traversing highs and lows of making and child-raising with an ease of holding it all at once. It’s always there to go back to. Truitt’s lucent, understated prose reminds that cycles will churn, and meanwhile, by a window, cast in warmth, you compose a life.
Nicotiana / Nicotine, Nell Zink
I keep trying to tell Europeans that everyone in America smokes now, or has since 2021, which they usually, perhaps rightfully, resist accepting—for who knows what other about-turns lie beyond that development. Nicotiana is an essence of emotional upswell, for when anxious begets addicted and aloof; a teacher once described it as “an ally for false guarding” or what happens when we “put up walls,” pacify by locking down, don masks of tough, numb, and thriving. Sounds familiar enough. Nicotiana is a harmonizer from ground up, it listens to earth pain to help crack through yours, re-centering you in your own heart, breath, and communal bonds. Nicotine, a novel by longtime expatriate and Brandenburg resident Nell Zink, follows a band of Jersey City squatters (joined in a late 2010s nearly extinct tobacco dependency) as they help their Zoomer landlord navigate a loss. Replete with Shamanic rituals, agitprop, and cross-country roadtrips, Nicotine is a family saga, romance novel, and gymnastic farce. It’s not so necessary to describe its plot in detail as to caution that you might get hooked. Results will vary, anyhow. See also: Harry Mathews’ Cigarettes, an elegant puzzle and after a fashion, perhaps a quiet precedent.
Star of Bethlehem / The Book of All Loves, Agustin Fernández Mallo (trans. Thomas Bunstead)
I take Star of Bethlehem when I feel insane: strung out, cortisol stoked, heart-worn, processing an Event. Off a plane, a job, a gathering—friction, fission, crash. It’s a one foot in front, Bach original series essence, very where to go when unsure how to “go from there.” It’s for assimilating baselines and saying: “hey, I’m alright” (add Red Clover for further mental deprogramming and Columbine for a fresh start). There are some wonderful “coming down from mountain” flowers to work with; Star of Bethlehem is more like walking back from a cliff, a storm, finding ground when slipped down a crevasse. It’s invested in bringing you inside, bruised but home, rekindling an inner omniscience of yes, safe and recovering, if only for more to come. Literature, of course, is a mirror of that voice. I would prefer to look for it among sharp, cool postwar women writers, so, as they say, “gimlet eyed”: Gallant, Ginzburg, Hazzard. But that would mean only becoming more lost in the differences between their conscribed, bordered hells and ours, open-ended.
What, then, constitutes a contemporary analogue for Star of Bethlehem’s state of hurt and halfway, hopeful, “found”? A disaster story, one that by now we already know, or are about to know…future blackout meets a couple in a sinking Venice present, before and in between, and post… The Book of All Loves from Agustin Fernández Mallo, Spanish writer and physicist, author of The Nocilla Trilogy, embraces the requisite chronological shadow play of its form but offers something sincere and shining in return: a notion of love as pure current folding in and out of unease, that cuts across void, only to learn how to be stabilized by miasma: what flower essences are really for. In neutralizing grief (lately, for me, often grief anticipated), Star of Bethlehem implies an “after” that is ever; it is surfing that ever-after that is its task and our enactment: four drops a day, in water, so that a spine, strewn apart, can begin to re-stack, or stack itself, further to the point. The Book of All Loves has aphorisms worthy of Bach catch-all, completist ideations, and a poetry of a more singular, stylized resonance; Mallo’s intertextual touches, edging into dissolution. There are many streams that run through Mallo’s text—technology, place, space, feeling—perhaps too many, but relatably so: “reality” is indeed that layered, that tiered, that rife with competing information and timelines. I often resort to Star of Bethlehem to tease the streams apart, when tense and wired. These are very primary things: in their opacity, also quite clear.
Moselle is a visual artist and writer living in Zürich. She was also one of Health Gossip’s first guests. Read more on her blog, Oil on Canvas.
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