The 'Stingers'

My childhood home lay within the circular earthen banks of an

ancient Saxon settlement. To me and my friends, they were

simply ‘the walls’ – steep grassy slopes that were our

playground. We would roll down them in summer; sledge

down them in winter and build makeshift shelters in the scrub

at their base enjoying ‘just being’ in nature. We didn’t ask who

had walked in our footsteps before us, nor did we realise how

unique this setting was.

One summer’s evening, after a long day playing on the walls, I

noticed that nature was ‘bedding down for the night’ and I

realised I should hurry home for tea. Unfortunately, I lost my

footing and tumbled headlong into a dense clump of nettles, or

‘stingers’ as my family called them. I was wearing a thin t-shirt

and shorts and my little body was stung from head-to-toe in

stinging hives. I screamed all the way home and mum, upon

hearing the kerfuffle, took a quick look at me and practically

threw me into a cold bath to cool down the hives that had

sprung up all over me.

It took my skin a good few days to recover from that incident,

and I railed against the unlucky experience that had occurred

that day, but it taught me to give nettles a healthy respect from

that day onwards.

Commentary

Looking back, I cannot help but wonder differently. Those

ancient banks had witnessed countless generations before

mine – healers, herbalists, mothers, children, sickness, despair

and recovery. I wonder whether the Medicine Woman had

always been there – not as a ghost hidden among the nettles,

but as the timeless wisdom held within the land itself.

Nettles are faithful companions of disturbed ground. They

often appear where the earth has been unsettled, where

people have lived, worked, grieved and healed over

generations. I cannot help wondering whether that is why they

flourished upon those ancient Saxon walls. Or perhaps nettles

have always understood something we so easily forget – that

healing seldom begins where nothing has been broken.

The Medicine Woman, it seems, has always known that

healing rarely begins on untouched ground. More often, it

begins exactly where the earth – and the heart – have been

disturbed. The land itself had been disturbed for centuries,

layer upon layer of human story resting beneath my feet. And

so I delve a little further, unearthing the ancient archaeology

within my own bones…

I have no memory of my birth. How could I? I was a newborn.

Yet neither did my mother…

Shortly after I was born, she became desperately unwell. She

was admitted to a psychiatric hospital where she underwent

electroconvulsive therapy. Afterwards, she never regained the

memories of my birth or of those first precious weeks of my

life. What she did remember was the anguish of having me

taken from her arms.

My grandparents became my world. Grandpa endured the

long night feeds while Nana took me two or three times a week

to visit my mother.

I sometimes wonder what those journeys left within my tiny

nervous system. Not memories in the way we usually think of

them, but impressions.

The unfamiliar smell of disinfectant.

The clang of heavy doors.

The jangle of keys.

The tension in whispered conversations.

The grief that adults try so hard to hide from children.

There is no way of knowing. Yet I cannot help wondering

whether our bodies sometimes remember what our minds

cannot.

Years later, as I learned herbal medicine, I discovered nettles

in an entirely different way. No longer simply ‘stingers’, they

became one of our great native healing plants – richly

nourishing, cleansing and restorative. Traditionally they have

been used to support the blood, encourage circulation and

help the body release what has become stagnant.

Alongside this practical herbal wisdom grew my own symbolic

understanding. I began to see nettles as a plant that asks us

not to avoid discomfort, but to move through it. A medicine

that stings before it nourishes.

When I look back to that childhood tumble into the nettles, I

sometimes wonder whether there was more to that moment

than simple bad luck.

Around the age of six or seven, many spiritual traditions

describe a child beginning to move from the deep instinctive

foundations of life towards a growing awareness of

relationship, emotion and flow. Whether or not that framework

speaks to everyone, I find myself quietly wondering…

Was the Medicine Woman already teaching me?

Was this the first whisper of a lesson I would spend a lifetime

learning?

Did the land, quite literally, stop me in my tracks?

Did those stingers awaken something that my conscious mind

would only come to understand decades later?

I do not know.

But I find myself smiling at the possibility that the healing

began long before I realised that the Medicine Woman had

been quietly walking beside me.