Pacific Bleeding Heart on the forest floor

This one stopped us in our tracks. She is so pretty, and they were all over. Low to the ground, fern-like leaves fanning out across the forest floor, clusters of rose-purple heart-shaped flowers hanging like little lanterns from arching stems. Its Latin name tells you everything: Dicentra means “twice-spurred,” describing the shape of its flowers, and formosa comes directly from the Latin word for “beautiful” or “well-formed.” She definitely has earned both names.

Pacific Bleeding Heart is native to the moist lowland coniferous forests of the Pacific Northwest — meaning this plant belongs to this land. She is not a visitor. She is an original keeper.

What She Carries Medicinally

⚠ Always work with a trained herbalist before using any plant medicinally. This plant contains alkaloids that are toxic in large quantities.

What She Says Spiritually

A heart-shaped flower that bleeds. Think about that. This is not a plant of numbness or avoidance — she is a plant that says: feel it fully so it can move through you. She grows in the deep shade, on the forest floor, close to the roots of things. She is telling you that healing doesn’t always happen in the open light. Sometimes it happens in the quiet places, low to the ground, where you have to slow down and get close to really see her. She asks for trust in the emotional uncertainty.

She has a symbiotic relationship with hummingbirds, who are among her main pollinators — and she carries her seeds through the forest by way of ants. She is in relationship with everything around her. She knows she doesn’t have to do it alone.

Photo by Ky-Mani · His first bird

The Chestnut-backed Chickadee is painted with a warm, rich rusty chestnut across its back and sides — the most vividly colored of all the chickadee species. A bird of the Pacific Northwest, of dense wet forests and misty coastal ranges. This bird belongs here too.

Small. Bold. Loud. Absolutely fearless.

What the Traditions Say

Native American tribes understood the chickadee as a messenger from the spirit world of the ancestors — a carrier of truth and knowledge. Some tribes considered it a direct warning system: this bird appears when there is something you need to know.

In Cherokee mythology, the chickadee is an honest bird that spiritually guides human beings. There is a story of a monster whose only weakness was hidden from all the warriors — until a chickadee landed directly on the truth. Not the heart. The real thing. The chickadee always finds what is hidden and points to it plainly.

The Plains Indians trusted the chickadee to carry success and abundance, especially at harvest time. And for the Celts, the chickadee was credited with giving glorious words to poets — connected to Bragi, the deity of writing, music, and the arts. Two species were named among the nine sacred songbirds of Celtic tradition.

The Medicine It Brings

These birds move in flocks called a banditry. A banditry of tiny, bold, truth-telling birds. There is something ceremonial about that.

Birch in the forest

If you have ever stood in a grove of birch trees, you know what it feels like before you know why. There is something about the white bark — the way it catches light and seems to glow even in overcast weather. Something ancient in it. Almost as if eyes are staring back at you.

Known to the Celts as Beith (pronounced “bay”), the birch is the symbol of new beginnings, regeneration, hope, new dawns, and the promise of what is to come. The tree carries ancient wisdom and yet appears forever young. Beith is also the first tree of the Ogham — the Celtic tree alphabet — celebrated at Samhain, the Celtic new year, when bundles of birch twigs were used to sweep out the spirits of the old year and make way for what was coming.

The Pioneer Tree

Ecologists call birch a pioneer species — one of the first trees to return after disturbance, whether fire, storm, or ecological collapse. It tolerates harsh conditions, helps rebuild soil, and creates the conditions for the wider forest to return. This is not just botany. This is medicine. Birch shows up first in the devastated places. She says: we begin again here.

What the Traditions Carry

In Siberian shamanic tradition, birch was the tree that allowed new shamans entry into the spirit world. Birch seedlings were used in purification rituals for initiates, and birch trees were planted near the shaman’s dwelling as a portal — a symbolic doorway that allowed passage between the worlds.

In some Ojibwe communities, birch bark was a sacred gift from Wenabozho, a cultural hero, and their dead were wrapped in birch bark. Birch bark scrolls depicted the symbols of the Grand Medicine Society. In Celtic tradition, the birch was deeply protective — boughs were hung over doors on Midsummer’s Eve to guard the home and bring good luck. Fertility goddesses Frigga and Freya, as well as Eostre — the Anglo-Saxon goddess of spring from whom we derive the word Easter — all hold strong connections to the birch tree.

What are you beginning? What ground are you consecrating with your roots?