Story of Wild Rose Medicine
Subrosa Santo means holy wild rose, or under the holy rose. This medicine came to me whilst deeply connecting with my indigenous mexicana ancestors while in the dark depths of trauma healing.
Many peoples indigenous to Turtle Islands have stories about the wild rose and revere her as being a symbol of life. In greek mythology they are considered a symbol of immortal love or a union that will never fade. Sub rosa, under the rose, symbolizes secrecy.
In my experience with wild rose, that immortality and secrecy are symbolic of our soul or essence. The most essential parts of our being that remain a secret, even to us, until we are brave enough to open beyond our stories and conditioning about who we are. Wild Rose supports us in this journey.
I love wild rose. She’s strong, delicately thorny and sharp, and resilient. She has beautiful 5 petaled flowers and If the bush is cut the roots will photosynthesize through the darkness of the earth and re-grow. After her blossoms die she offers a rose hip fruit. And every part of wild rose is medicine, used for thousands of years by indigenous peoples.
In the emotional and energetic realms wild rose brings us back to aliveness. She gently soothes, opens our hearts to love, connects us to our essence, joy, purpose, enthusiasm, and passions.
Wild rose opens us to the joys of life and death.
Grief is the journey of that opening. Grief medicine has been deeply interwoven in this path with wild rose.
I love grief medicine and the way wild rose led me to and through the griefs so that I could come back to life. I’m more alive, open, and joyful than I’ve ever been. What could have destroyed me made me more hearty, vital, and connected to my Essence than I ever could have dreamed of.
This is the power of grief and wild rose medicine.
My Story
I was birthed by grief
Every initiation and becoming in my life has been through grief.
We are all born into this world grieving the loss of the womb, all we have known. I lost my mother at that time as well. Pre-verbal grief that still echoes in my bones. It took me 30 plus years to know that’s what I had been carrying my whole life, the root of the depression, anxiety, CPTSD, ADHD, chronic illness… it was un-grieved grief.
Going through a divorce brought it to my awareness. There were not a lot of people in my life who understood or could hold the depths of my grief, so I turned to nature. I spent days and nights in Tilden Forest in Berkeley, at Mount Tamalpais, on the beaches of Santa Cruz, with the Rio Grande, the mesas, and caves of Taos, the beautiful lands of Hummingbird in Mora, the lakes, creeks, and trails of north east Oklahoma. I connected with wild rose and began to tend her as my muse.
The lands, waters, wild rose, and the more-than-human world taught me how to grieve.
Each time I grieved I became more present in my body. The fractures of my psyche began to move toward each other and heal. Throughout this time I practiced Chod, a Tibetan Buddhist shamanic practice for healing and accessing primordial wisdom free from fear. A practice that requires one to confront ones deepest fears. Mine was my grief… and later my own aliveness.
During this period of learning to grieve, all of the other Buddhist and Daoist practices I had been practicing for years started to take root and deepen.
At some point in all of this I realized I carry grief medicine. I began to seek out others who did as well. Places where the medicine I carried was welcomed and celebrated. Where I could learn how to be in service to grief medicine. And then I was invited by Dana Schlick into assisting and facilitating grief rituals.
The community grief rituals blew my mind! They took my apprenticeship with grief to an entirely new level. When we grieve communally through ritual we have a much larger capacity than when we are alone. Our bodies and nervous systems are made to grieve together. I experienced first hand the freedom possible in communal grief ritual and knew it would be a large part of my life’s work.
Little did I know that all of this was preparing me to show up to hold and then lose my adoptive mother. Because of my journeys with grief and trauma I was able to be there for her as she was dying of dementia. In the last year of her life I cared for her and held space as she unraveled a lifetime of trauma and grief, while we both were simultaneously grieving the loss of her cognitive function and life. My mom died so peacefully at dawn on a mid-summers day in 2023. Three weeks later I held vigil as my soul companion and best friend, Xena Tiger Queen my cat of 17 years, passed from this world.
It was not the first time I had been with the dying. It was the closest and most devastating losses I had experienced in my adulthood. The intimacy with death I experienced with them not only took me deeper into grief, it birthed me more fully into my life. Having danced, sang, cried, broken down, and broken up with death and grief I became dedicated to being alive.
The things I had feared most in my life had happened. I lost a mother, again. I lost the being who knew me most intimately in this world, again. I was alone in many ways and there was nothing holding me back but myself. Every aspect of Essence that I had reclaimed for myself up to that point yearned towards life. To take risks on my own behalf. To shed the old identities that had ensorcelled my mind, body, and spirit. To be in service to the grief and death medicine, which is ultimately being in service to Essence and Life.
Each day I recommit myself to that. It’s been the only clear and constant in my life. I know that if I die tomorrow I will not regret one moment of this dedication to Grief, Death, Life and Essence. How that discipleship looks may change shape and form, and I trust that. Because to walk in this way is to be so deeply intimate with Great Mother Unknown. I am forever Her devoted child.