A teacher from my lineage of acupuncture, Master Nagano spoke about how people who lived in relationships to the natural world, such as fishermen and farmers were easier to cure of disease than those who worked in cities and with people.

Learning about plants growing around you is a good way to attune your body to the season and start to develop a relationship with the land you live on. When you notice the rhythms of growth and death, action and rest, flowering to seed - you have a deeper awareness of how energy is moving in your own body.

You also might start to form deep relationships with plants and land as you watch their life cycles and return to the same spots for harvest year after year. These deeply reciprocal relationships also help us to understand the importance of the protecting wild spaces like the fairy creek watershed for example.

As a white bodied settler, forming these relationships of respect with the land is not only of benefit to our physical well-being but also can be a part of healing ancestral trauma that informs & contributes to our relationship with on-going colonization. As we reackon with the grief of ancestral displacement and move towards repair of right relationships with plants and land we become accountable to our histories and are less likely to perpetuate harm.