I treasure the moment when a podcast host realizes on-air that they’ve been pronouncing a word differently from everyone else. Just got poignant as “poig-nant”.
Is there a name for that type of realization? It happens to and around me a lot. Does this only happen in English?
Listening to a podcast about anticolonial approaches to writing herbal monographs for personal use. It’s Sam Roberts on Planting Medicine and it’s good 🌱
Loved this take on how to organize across differences in privilege:
“One of my favourite organizers in history is a guy named Witold Pilecki, who organized a resistance cell inside Auschwitz… He said that the people he chose for that cell were the ones that he saw do an action that helped another person and harmed them. Help another person, and gain nothing.
You wanna know if you can trust the white people you organize with? Put them in that position. Do it over and over and over again.”
From this episode of The Red Nation Podcast.
Reminds me of the classic Real Ally Shit zine— finding the difference between pretty words and dependable people:
What a treat to hear a host on my fave herbal medicine podcast encouraging people to wear masks to protests to protect against covid and long covid. Lots of other good protest safety tips in here, plus some herbal ideas for street medics.
I remember herbalist Kelly McCarthy suggesting that good herbs for perimenopause are the ones you already have a long relationship with. To just find ways to incorporate your plant friends into your life a little more, as a starting place, whether that is a digestive bitter, calming tea, moisturizer, good-smelling garden plant, or whatever.
That seems like a good approach for general times of stress or illness too, to start by turning up your existing support.
This random herb thought was brought to you by me running a pain management bath at 4am, and deciding to add rose water and make a rose tea. Rose is not an herb for pain, and yet it is nice to be with my plant friend when I am sore.
Huge shout out to Bob McDonald for asking David Putrino all the good naive questions about covid on mainstream public radio. Starts at 19:30 or scroll down to that section.
Quirks & Quarks Mar 15: The silent, long-term effects of COVID, and more…
“Wow is that nervous system damage permanent?”
“What is special about covid that allows it to spread through the body, when we think of it infecting the lungs?”
“If covid has the ability to suppress the immune system, how does that affect our ability to fight off other pathogens?”
“What about people who think since they are living a healthy lifestyle, covid isn’t really a worry for them?”
“How far do you think this might go towards explaining the huge spike in excess deaths?”
And the biggie:
“What should we do with all this information, now that most people think the threat of covid is gone?”
I’m pretty into this framing of “new information about silent health damage from every covid infection”, even though it is not new or very silent. I hope it helps some covid deniers rejoin the evidence-based world. Nice one, Quirks and Quarks.
Ahhh I knew I would love this latest Death Panel podcast with Sophie Lewis talking about their book Enemy Feminisms but it’s so so fun.
I appreciate Sophie Lewis for being willing to take things to their logical conclusion. If there are all these historical examples of feminists collaborating with fascist groups (cops, kkk, imperialists, nazis, alt-right transphobes…) why can’t we describe those forms of feminism as fascist?
Is there a book award for best book titles? I would nominate Sophie Lewis for lifetime achievement. (Enemy Feminisms, Full Surrogacy Now, Abolish the Family…)
Having successfully sprouted native plants from seed using the very easy method in this podcast episode, I can now recommend a listen. Got me thinking about supporting local genetic diversity of each native plant species, not just a diversity of species.
Heather McCargo from The Wild Seed Project on Cultivating Place
Plus if you start native plants from seed you get to see their tiny baby form ❤️
This is a Nootka Rose / Rosa nutkana that sat outside in its pot all winter and popped up in March.
Sometimes it is hard to guess whether a sprout is your intended plant or a weed, but this one is recognizable even when still tiny. A little Western Red Columbine / Aquilegia formosa that sat unattended outside all winter and started slowly growing itself in February.
Yarrow started coming up in December and hasn’t stopped. It’s one of those plants that really loves life. Hopefully it will stay this happy once i transplant it into my lawn 🌱
Great Camas / Camassia lechtlinii has been making me emotional by self-seeding all over my garden after its first year of blooming, but it did come up really well in outdoor trays as well. It’s like it was meant to grow here or something.
Last baby photo for today: this is a wildflower from the prairies (not my region) that I am growing because it’s so pretty. Prairie Smoke / Geum triflorum. It was described as non-invasive here in the PNW and I would believe it– suuuuper tiny seedlings sprouted outdoors in February, but sparsely and they have been growing very slowly.
Last thing I want to make sure to share for #LongCovidAwarenessDay is this podcast interview with Emily Dupree, the absolute legend / regular person who founded Clean Air Club and inspired dozens of similar lending library projects, providing free air filters and far-uvc lights for arts events. Her clarity about clean air and mask requirements as access issues is 👌🏻
I’m posting these little camas babies for #MillionsMissingFlowers , a monthly chance to talk about ME/CFS.
This month I am thinking about how long it takes to get an ME diagnosis, 5+ years or more on average. ME is already listed as a common (5%+) outcome of covid infections, and we’re just finishing year four. I wonder how many people will realize this year that they got ME from covid in 2020. I wonder about Omicron in 2022.
Sources:
I really appreciated Bea in this episode of Death Panel, talking about the process of self-diagnosing before deciding to see a doctor.
She spent a year thinking she was just reading too much, before realizing she was going blind. Different conditions, but that’s so familiar to me– I spent a year thinking I was just sleep deprived or stressed before realizing I had cognitive and energy impairments.