I found some purslane!

Living on a farm with lots of animals means lots of nutrient-rich sediment in gateways and laneways. And because we use rotational grazing, the various gateways and laneways get time to recover from being trampled by hoofs -- which means time for communities of plants of all kinds to keep developing, diversifying, and dropping their seeds.

Then the animals come back, graze, trample, stir things around, drop their manure, and move on again -- and the diversification continues.

This morning in a gateway that hasn't had any hoofed animals through in a while, I found a lovely surprise among plants busy colonizing the bare ground in our early tropical summer -- purslane (Portulaca oleracea).

They would have germinated from seed that somehow arrived at our old dairy shed from who-knows where, then were washed down a shallow incline to the gateway at the bottom. 

Where they're now jostling for space with other opportunistic plants, all of them working together to fill up the space left by the trampling of hoofed animals. 

In the image below, note the plantain plant way down the bottom, slightly left of center. It's shaped a bit like a star or a snowflake. 

This morning when I saw these plantain plants I had been about to open the gateway to allow cattle through.

I left the cattle where they were and took the time to rescue some of these precious purslane plants from the soon-to-be trampled gateway, and bring them to the garden.

Yay!

Yay for purslane!

Purslane fits beautifully into my favorite category of food plants -- the kind that some people call "weeds," and others call "nutritious and medicinal herbs."

They're kinds that volunteer themselves right on our doorsteps (or in our gateways) to provide free, nutritious food that far surpasses anything we'll ever find in a supermarket.

In terms of nutrition and vitality, they even surpass any domesticated food plant we grow ourselves -- I wrote more about that, here.

Purslane - description 

Purslane is a low growing succulent plant that forms dense mats across the ground. It has small, rounded leaves on thick, smooth stems.

In my experience the stems have a reddish tinge, but the internet says they can also be green, yellowish-green, or purplish-green. The stems look shiny. They branch out from a central taproot, radiating in all directions so that the young plants often appear to be in the shape of a star or snowflake.

Purslane produces small yellow flowers and LOTS of tiny (truly tiny) black seeds inside a clever little cup left behind after the flower.

Purslane growing conditions

Purslane is very easy to grow, as all "weeds" are. It produces prolific seeds which can stay dormant for a long time, then germinate abundantly when soils temperatures climb above about 27 degrees Celsius.

It needs lots of sunshine, is not fussed about soil quality, and does not like to be too wet.

Inadequate sunshine and too much moisture are the reasons purslane doesn't volunteer around here very often -- so now I'm pondering how to arrange a niche for the plants I found this morning to be in a spot that's sheltered from too much rain but still receiving lots of sunshine. It might mean that if I want to keep it near the kitchen (the best place for frequently used food plants) I have to put some in a big shallow container and move it around a bit.

Which I think would be worthwhile because, well, purslane!

Eating purslane 

Purslane is very nutritious. 

Michael Pollan is said to have called it one of the two most nutritious plants on the planet in his book In Defense of Food. The other one was apparently lambs quarters, another wild edible and a member of the amaranth family.

I'm not sure how its possible to label a given plant as "most nutritious," since that tries to fix in place something that's changeable and context-dependent, but anyhow -- the general consensus is that if you make a list, purslane is up there near the top of it.

In her book, How Can I Use Herbs in my Daily Life, Isabell Shipard describes purslane as a nutritional powerhouse, particularly in terms of minerals (most notably calcium, iron, magnesium, and potassium), omega-3 fatty acids, vitamins (A, B, C), and antioxidants.

Purslane has been used a food plant throughout the drier, hotter parts of the world--Mediterranean & Middle East, Mexico & Latin America, and Australasia--for a very long time. Hundreds or thousands of years.

The leaves and young stems are crunchy, fleshy, and have a mild lemony taste. They can be eaten raw in the garden and in salads, or cooked any way you can think of to cook them. 

You can also make pesto with purslane. You could make vinegar with it. You can pickle the young stems. In fact, here is a list of 20 purslane recipes, and here is another list of 45 ways to eat it - oh my!

Purslane as a medicinal herb

Science Direct has a page that describes purslane as "a medicinal herb that is edible and possesses multiple biological activities, including anti-inflammatory, anti-oxidation, immune regulation, and anti-tumor effects. 

That's just a small mouthful of the medicinal properties attributed to purslane on the internet. For more, see my sources below or get a cuppa and find some yourself. 

I have no personal experience with using purslane medicinally and therefore no suggestions on it, except to repeat the quote from who ever it was that said, "Let food be thy medicine..."

If you have stories about using it medicinally, please scroll to the bottom and share them in the comments -- please and thank you

Sources

Sources for this post (that I didn't already link to) include:

A review of traditional uses of ... Portulaca oleracea

Ameliorative effects of Portulaca oleracea L. (purslane) and its active constituents on nervous system disorders

Most of us pay far more attention to our outer lives than we do to our inner lives, taking care of all the day to day activities that make our outer world go ‘round.

Meanwhile, our inner world is growing wild and out of control in some areas and wilting from neglect in other areas.

As in a literal garden, unless we're present, paying attention, and pro-actively taking action, the weeds will out-compete the things we want to grow in there.

Our fears, disappointments, doubts, regrets, and old ingrained patterns—the “weeds”—compete for available resources with the things we’re hopeful, excited, purposeful or passionate about – the useful and beautiful things we want to grow in our inner gardens.

The seasons - a framework for tending to our inner gardens

Luckily, there is a guiding framework for tending to our inner gardens. It’s the same framework we use for tending to our literal veggie patches: the seasons.

The energies of the seasons are the energies of the cycle of life: birth/emergence, growth, full bloom, harvest, decay, death/dormancy, and rebirth.

With the seasons as our guide, we know that spring time is for new beginnings, summer is for tending and guiding the rampant growth, autumn is for harvesting, pruning, and composting, and winter is for resting, integrating the lessons we learned in our previous efforts, and choosing what seeds we want to plant when spring comes again.

The same principles apply in our inner world.

The “seeds” of spring are the intentions you set. The visioning you do, the creative work of choosing how you want to design and orchestrate your inner life. 

The focus of summer is judging where to concentrate your efforts so that you can give time and energy to the beautiful, useful things you are growing, rather than letting the “weeds” take over all the resources. 

In autumn you gather the "harvest," tidy up, prune and cut back, and put what's no longer needed into the compost.

And in winter you rest and reflect, to integrate the lessons of the previous seasons and so be a little wiser when spring brings new opportunities for fresh starts.

Serious gardeners wouldn't dream of neglecting this seasonal work in a physical garden, but have you thought about how your inner garden needs just the same care and tending?

One way to tend your inner garden is with a journaling or free-writing practice that you align with the seasons (there'll be lots more on this, below). And you can think of the seasons as phases in the cycle of life. 

Micro and macro expressions of the cycle of life

Gardeners know that the life cycle expresses itself everywhere, all the time, zoomed in and zoomed out, endlessly repeating in micro and macro forms.

We find it in the short life cycle of an insect: emerging, growing, blooming, leaving fertile eggs, declining and dying all within a few days. 

It's also there in the waxing and waning energies of the 24 hour diurnal cycle, in menstrual cycles, in the lunar cycle, in the solar cycle (the solar cycle is the annual round of the seasons, which take 13 lunar cycles to complete), and it's there in the relatively long life cycle of human beings, repeating down the generations.

(There are even larger manifestations of the cycle, too, which astrologers and philosophers know about, but I’m only vaguely aware of them so I wont try to describe them here.)

In the next section I'll touch briefly on the topic of "weeds," then in the rest of this article I'll concentrate mainly on how you can align your journaling practice with the seasons of the year (the solar cycle) and with the lunar cycle.

When weeds crop up

One of the things that happens when you dedicate yourself to any kind of introspective journaling practice is that you get to look at your problems--the weeds in your inner garden--from different angles.

If you're a student of Permaculture or any other method/s of regenerative gardening or farming, you know that weeds are actually allies in disguise. They come to heal the soil and to support resilience and biodiversity in our systems. The trick is learning how to work with them rather than struggling against them. 

The same principle applies to the "weeds" in our inner gardens. Our problems, I believe without exception, hold  gifts for us.

The reason we so rarely get glimpses of those gifts is because  we usually try to shoot the messenger rather than paying attention to what it has to say.

So when you see "weeds" growing in your inner garden don't be so hard on yourself, or on the weeds.

In your outside garden, you probably ask yourself why the weeds are here, why these particular weeds, what they might be indicating. You can do the same for your inner garden, by asking questions like these in your journal:

With that said, let's get onto some specific ideas for how to tend your inner garden using a season-based journal.

Keeping a season-based journal for tending your inner garden

When you choose a cycle to align your journaling with, you need a cycle whose time frame is easy to work with -- not too short and not too long.

The solar cycle takes a year and could be as small a commitment as sitting down at the beginning of each season, and perhaps midway through the season, to do a journaling practice aligning with the energies of that season.

(As I wrote in this post, not all places and cultures mark "four seasons." But the archetypal energies of birth, growth and expansion, full bloom, contraction, death, decay, and re-growth are universal. Referring to them as spring, summer, autumn and winter gives us a useful handle with which to get a grasp on them.)

Let's begin with the season of Spring.

Spring, and the Spring Equinox

Around the beginning of spring, everything in nature is brimming with the energy of new beginnings. In your inner garden journal, you can ask and answer questions like, 

 A few days ago in the Southern Hemisphere (September 23rd) we marked the Spring Equinox. This is the mid-point of spring, one of two moments in the solar year when the daylight hours are equal to the hours of darkness. 

Jane Hardwicke Collings teaches that this moment of balance between light and dark is a good time to invite balance into our lives by contemplating the growth that has taken hold in your life and asking questions like these:

Summer

During summer, when you can hardly keep up with all the watering, weeding, mulching, you can ask questions like,

The summer solstice (the middle of summer, around December 21st in the Southern Hemisphere and June 21st in the Northern Hemisphere) is the moment in the solar cycle when the days are longest and the nights shortest. In the glaring light, all is revealed. You can ask,

Autumn, and the Autumn Equinox

Autumn is the season of harvest, reckoning, and then decline. You could ask,

If you live in the Northern Hemisphere, you have just marked the Autumn Equinox on September 23rd, the mirror opposite of the Spring Equinox in the Southern Hemisphere.

This is the mid-point of Autumn, and it’s the other moment in the solar year when the daylight hours are equal to the hours of darkness.

Jane Hardwicke Collings teaches that this moment of balance between light and dark is a good time to invite balance into our lives by contemplating what you need to let go of, what you need to  prune away or put on the compost heap.

Winter 

In the winter, you get to rest. Winter invites you to sink down, down, down. Into the deep, dark stillness. Into the earth. Into the dormancy and potentiality that lies between the ending of one cycle and the beginning of the next.

In winter, you can ask questions like these:

The lunar cycle 

The lunar expression of the cycle of life takes around 29 days, rather than a full year. So if you choose to track the lunar cycle and use it to prompt your inner gardening practices, the opportunities for growth, learning, consolidating and then taking a fresh start come around more quickly. 

The dark moon and the new moon

September 26th marked what modern astrology calls a New Moon – the moment when the moon passes between the earth and sun so that no light reflects from it to the earth.

Older systems of astrology name this the Dark Moon, and recognize its energy as still, dormant, but full of potential – some of the same qualities we recognize in the deep, dark, quietness of mid-winter. 

In the days after the Dark Moon, if you're looking into the morning sky before the rising sun obscures it, you may glimpse the first thin sliver of moon reappearing in the morning sky. 

This can be more appropriately called the New Moon, and its energy, like the very beginning of spring, is the energy of germination/birth. Delicate, vulnerable new beginnings are stirring.

Same cycle, same energies, zoomed in or out

Journaling by the phases of the moon is very similar to journaling by the seasons of the year.

The new moon and the waxing phases are the ending of winter, the spring, and the early summer of the lunar cycle.

The full moon is equivalent to the Summer Solstice.

The waning phases of the moon are to equivalent late summer, autumn, and early winter, and the dark moon equates to the Winter Solstice. 

Same cycle, same energies. Just zoomed in a little closer.

You may choose to pay attention to several cycles to guide your inner gardening practices, for example the seasons of the year and the phases of the moon. 

If you do that, you'll find that sometimes the same seasons of the different cycles overlay each other. Other times, they line up across from each other. Cosmic energies expressing sometimes opposite each other, sometimes together, always changing, never static, in the endless dance of earth, sun, moon, and your own inner garden. 

Your "seed bank," and new beginnings every spring

Not all seeds germinate in their first spring. Gardeners and farmers talk about a "seed bank," the accumulated seeds from seasons past, waiting for just the right conditions to bring them to life. Some seeds lie waiting for years, and some for lifetimes, before they germinate. And some types of seed are so very prolific that there are thousands of them in the seed bank at any given time. 

There is a seed bank in the soil of your inner garden, too. All the seeds that have fallen in all the autumn seasons of your life are there, and all the seeds your ancestors let fall, and perhaps also many newer seeds from more recent cycles since you started paying more attention.

***

In the Southern Hemisphere right now, two cycles are aligning in their spring seasons.  We're a few days on from the Spring Equinox and we're experiencing a New Moon.

(If you're a menstruating woman in the first few days or week of your menstrual cycle, you get a triple whammy: three spring seasons are aligning in your life.)

During the season of spring in any expression of the cycle of life, and especially when two or more spring seasons line up together, whatever you are doing and thinking is in effect germinating new “seeds” from the seed bank in the soil of your inner garden. 

Ideas, ways, habits, patterns, interpretations – all have moved through the deep, dark, still winter portal of potentiality and are now stirring with newness. 

The newness may express itself as a repeat of previous patterns – well established things that keep popping up in your life over and over again. Or it may express in ways that you choose deliberately, by making careful choices about the seeds you activate. 

As early spring ripens toward summer, the newly germinated “seeds,” establish themselves more strongly. If you bring them to fruition, they in turn will drop seeds that will wait dormant through the winter and may then germinate next spring, gifting their promise and their teachings to the inner garden of your life.

Can you begin to see the power you have to influence the way your life will unfold? You, and only you, are in charge of how your inner garden is cared for, or even if it's cared for.

You get to influence what seeds will germinate in your own inner garden, what you will nurture through the growing season, what you will discard in the fall, and what you will hold onto during the dormant winter, to carry on into the following spring. 

As within, so without

It's never too late to bring conscious awareness to your inner garden and to begin to tend it just as you would any other garden.

We have very little control over what happens in our outer worlds, but our inner gardens are ours to tend.

In here, if we approach the task with sincere dedication, we can develop the capacity to grow truly beautiful, productive, useful gardens. 

As within, so without. The attitude of uncaring neglect we so often see in our other world, toward each other, toward other life-forms, and toward our only Earth, is a mirror. It reflects to us how our culture has taught us to treat our internal selves. 

Repairing the damage we see in the world outside ourselves, paradoxically, begins as an inside job. 

Mother Nature's healing touch 

One last tip is this: remember that you are working with your inner garden here.

It may not respond at all to material things like changes in diet or schedules or working harder at something. It may respond much more to something as simple and subtle as a softening and opening in your attitude towards it.

If you're trying to make inner shifts, or to shift problems in your life that feel stuck and perhaps have been there for a long time, be gentle. Make space for a sense of possibility, rather than hardening and trying to force things.

Welcome your "weeds;" ask them what gifts they bring. Don't shoot the messenger.

Let the tears flow, if they need to, while you're doing this inner work. As you tend to the garden of you with gentleness and compassion, letting emotions move through you as water moves through soil, you're bringing Mother Nature's healing touch into your innermost self. 

Invite Mother Nature in, through the portal of the seasons. Let her help. She's been waiting to be asked. And as she helps you heal your inner garden, you'll be empowered to work more effectively in the gardens of your outer life. 

References and resources

None of what I wrote above originated with me. Here are a few of the sources I can think of to share with you right now. There are many more. 

May this starting point lead you on towards exactly the right teachers for you. And don't forget the best teacher of all: Mother Nature, who speaks directly to you through your own inner guidance.

Equinoxes and Solstices:

• Jane Hardwicke Collings "Ostara: Spring Equinox",  "Mabon: Autumn Equinox", "Winter Solstice, "Summer Solstice"
  
  

Lunar phases (the cycle of the moon):

• Jane Hardwicke Collings "Moon Phases and Corresponding Energy"
  
• The Moon School "Mysteries and Meaning of the Dark Moon Lunar Phase"
  
• The Moon School "Spiritual Meaning of the New Moon Phase"

Resources for women:

• Jane Hardwicke Collings "Spinning Wheels", a tool for women to track your inner and outer cycles and see how they all influence you at any given point in time.
  
• Jane Hardwicke Collings "Spiritual Practice of Menstruation," an eye-opening article if you have never thought of your cycle, your "inner seasons" as anything other than a nuiscance. Give it to your male partner to read, too, and your sons and daughter as they come of age. Everyone needs to know this information. 
• Jane Hardwicke Collings Blood Rites – The Spiritual Practice of Menstruation, a book. If you're ready for more after reading the article above, this is a deep dive. 
• Alexandra Pope The Woman's Quest Workbook. A 13 moon cyclical awareness course. I absolutely loved it. 
• Alexandra Pope and Sjanie Hugo Wurlitzer"Menstrual Cycle Awareness"
• Alexandra Pope and Sjanie Hugo Wurlitzer Wild Power. A deeply empowering read for spiritually-minded women who want to align more truly with their inner seasons and reap the rewards on offer.