Witch season is here, and herbalist Crystal Woodling is spending it slowly: tending three beehives, brewing nettle tea and keeping the old Samhain rituals for her ancestors.
In this episode, I sit down with Crystal Woodling, co-founder of the School of Heaven and Earth and an herbal witch from a long line of Appalachian medicine women.
Crystal and I were talking before we even hit record about feeling as a language, and that thread runs through this whole conversation. At Samhain she keeps a dumb supper, a silent meal with a place set for an ancestor, because, as she put it, "we have a long evolution of communicating through feeling and not through symbol." The three hives outside her bedroom door work the same way. The bees stay calm around people who move slowly, so "you're learning to regulate with the bees."
That's what slow living means to Crystal, and it's why she's proudly anti-AI. "In doing something fast, you're always going to sacrifice something, and it's going to be presence." She's just as honest about the tradwife version of homesteading, which makes the work look easy.
We sipped nettle tea the whole time, so we get into stinging nettle tea benefits and the way Crystal teaches herbs in her GAIA course. You drink the herb, sleep with it under your pillow and talk to it while it brews before you read a word about what it's for. I also tell the story of how nettles gave The Wild Ones its name.
Pour yourself some nettle tea and settle in. I hope you love this one as much as I did.
Episode Breakdown
- 04:23 — Welcome to witch season: Halloween vs Samhain and how to celebrate Samhain
- 07:45 — When is Samhain? Moon timing, cross-quarter days and the Pleiades
- 15:02 — The dumb supper: a silent meal for honoring your ancestors
- 18:56 — Samhain rituals: the communal fire, turnip jack-o'-lanterns and the Celtic new year
- 23:31 — Crystal's land sanctuary: a no-mow lawn, natural beekeeping and a future retreat center
- 36:20 — The tradwife movement and the reality of homesteading
- 42:41 — Food forests and the lazy garden that grew better
- 44:23 — Slow living vs AI: presence, attention and feeling reality again
- 53:57 — Stinging nettle tea benefits, tea as a relationship, and how nettles named The Wild Ones
- 68:26 — Learning herbs by relationship: Crystal's GAIA course, dreamwork and where to buy nettles
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