Dear friends,
hello, from Boulder, Colorado where I’ve been teaching for the week at the Jack Kerouac School’s 50th Summer Writing Program Anniversary. This week, I taught a workshop titled: Writing Ceremony, rituals in visionary poetics to a circle of 16 brilliant poets. I read from my new memoir, A Library of Light, on the stage of their performing arts center where I first stood 20 years ago as a student of hybrid forms and contemplative poetics. And where so many other luminaries—Diane di Prima, Amiri Baraka, Allen Ginsberg, Lyn Hejinian, Leslie Scalapino, and, the dearest of all to me, Akilah Oliver—once stood. I was reunited with my long-time mentor, a true goddess of poetry, and one of the founders of the Jack Kerouc School, Anne Waldman. I met new visionary friends and got to hug and cry with many old ones. And I also gave an artist talk titled, Syntax: a bioluminescence, which illuminated for the first time ever the glowing threads between my practice as a poet and herbalist. Through the lecture, I traced almost 20-years of interdisciplinary research and what I call ceremonial poetics practice-as-research, as I've written alongside the fields of biophysics, biophotonics, epigenetic theory, somatic psychologies, and flower essence therapies. It felt incredible to finally take the time and care to translate the research, writing, and my collaborations with plants and place into an essay that I could share with others. To trace the many ways that—through syntax or what I call the "light signatures" of words, plants, minerals, and place—both experimental poetry and the subtle medicine of flower essences can initiate profound physical, emotional, spiritual, cellular and epigenetic healing. During this lecture, I also introduced with/in herbals first ever poetry elixir, which, dear reader, I write to share with you today.
for healing ancestral lines—
Introducing of Light, a blend of 7 potent flower and gem essences infused into a wild sea rose elixir base. of Light elixir sparks epigenetic recalibration, soothes and transmutes grief, calls in one’s guides, helps us ground, infuses us with empowerment and inspired artistry, and attunes us to the heart's compass.
Made in communion with my memoir, A Library of Light, of Light elixir is a poem in a bottle and can be a beautiful support for a reader of the memoir moving through their own healing journey—or—for those looking to invite a deep shift in epigenetic resonance. I imagine it also as a companion for those working to heal deeply embedded ancestral wounds, for those tending ancestral altars, or even for those creating artwork that attends to their own ancestral lines.
Braiding my devotional work with plants and poetry, I worked with over 100 essences across the 11 years of writing A Library of Light. Eventually, 8 plants and minerals came forward to compose of Light, the elixir version of my written collection: essences of Greater Celandine, Angelica, Bleeding Heart, Iris, Crab Apple, Rose Quartz, and Black Tourmaline are all synergized in a Wild Sea Rose Elixir base.
A little about each plant & mineral:
Greater Celandine’s essence works within our epigenetic field to unscramble and transmute wounds hemmed into the DNA and spirit matter. These yellow blossoms transform the body into an antenna of clear reception and transmission helping us embody and articulate our greatest truths without fear.
Angelica’s essence streams profound tenderness, protection, and support through the body. And gifts us grounded, safe, open access to our guardian ancestors, star beings, and elemental spirits.
Bleeding Heart helps us honor our grief as a necessary and evolutionary tool. Its essence works to infuse the body with unconditional love, disentangle us from unhealthy relationships and co-dependencies, all while moving grief out of the heart-body and infusing the heart with comfort, clarity, and profound inner compassion.
Iris offers radiance of vision, inspired artistry, and a clearer, more resonant expression of our truest selves.
Crab Apple blossom supports cell-level healing and brings us to the central star of the self. This essence helps us heal epigenetic memories woven through our DNA, emotional trauma, abuse, and shame. Crab Apple connects our heart space to the heart of Earth, filters toxic energies and habits, and infuses us with buoyancy.
Rose quartz is a stone of intimacy. Its essence opens, softens, and soothes the heart. This mineral essence is a harmonizer and especially helpful in clearing pain held in the heart from traumatic events. It also acts as a balm for those whose inner child may not have been safe or nurtured as a child.
Black Tourmaline’s essence works deeply in the physical body to improve grounding, circulation, and strength as it balances the relationship between the upper and lower fields of our form. Its essence also helps us exchange toxic energies held in the body for restorative energies as it stimulates the organized release of old habits and patterns.
All of these essences are then blended into in my Wild Sea Rose elixir base. Rose elixir is peace and protection in a bottle. As soon as I take it, my heart softens, relaxes, and begins to glow. My senses are also softened but in a way that presences me. Rose petals work to cool heat in the blood, support and soothe the cardiovascular and digestive systems, ease inflammation, and tone the blood vessels, all while also easing anxiety, depression, trauma, grief, and the nervous system. Rose brings anxiety down from the brain and up from the gut into the heart to be recalibrated into what I like to think of as, Heart Coherence. Helping us to think with the brain that is our hearts. Rose helps us see beyond linearity, and, over time, to discern through the heart’s intelligence. To bloom, protected by our own radiance.
The radiance of these 8 plants and minerals supported my own writing and transformation and are woven through the composition of the book. After A Library of Light's publication, a flood of profound letters came in from readers. So many are moving through extreme grief and loss or are working to heal the lineages we've inherited. Reading these letters, I felt called to offer this luminous formula as support, spark, and balm.
Each of these plants and minerals glow their own resonant medicine. You can read about each one over in the apothecary and, should you feel called, order a bottle for yourself or a beloved while this season's bottles last.
About the elixir's companion—
A Library of Light is a book-length meditation on grief, epigenetic inheritance through my motherline, and poetry's effect on the cellular and sensory fields of the human body.
I began writing A Library of Light in 2011 with the glowing question: if light had a translatable syntax, what would it be? I took this question with me to Iceland and various corners of the Arctic, exposing my senses to unfamiliar saturations of light and darkness and wrote in conversation.
A year into the writing of this book, my mother died tragically and the writing of that book was eclipsed by another: one concerned with grief's syntax and quieter fields of cellular light in the form of memory. For over a decade, I wrote with and through the fields of biophotonics and epigenetic theory. I wrote with my mother's journals kept over the many years we had been estranged. I wrote with the plants who came forward to help me through. And I wrote with the divinatory diagrams of Emma Kunz (one of which graces the cover of my book).
May the ceremony of language (across species, beings, and time) hold you.
Love, Danielle
Anne Waldman, a long-stem rose, & me in her home.
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