Jewelweed Parable
copyright 2005, 2006 Alicia Russell-Smith, Sparkling Lotus Ink
Life’s most precious insights are often in the details, just like god/dess. Nine years ago, I was
instinctively drawn to essence preparation. Re-connecting with the alchemical process of essence co-
creation reminded me, very powerfully, of the initial optimism held in my life’s wish to understand the
wisdom of other species, especially those that bear flowers. I’d spent the two previous decades actively
courting a variety of plant medicine spirits. I held, as always, a particular interest in flowers and what I
thought of as their larger healing messages. Gradually, I realized I was receiving spontaneous electrical
attunements that facilitated the reception of these messages.
The attunements greatly accelerated once I began the active and somewhat indescribable journey of
essence co-creation. At first, I didn’t understand that the physical and psychic process was going to
lead me to a new (and very cellular) definition of light-working. One thing I’ve observed very clearly
since coming back home to this process is something I stress to all of my students: working the light
doesn’t automatically imply we’re standing in it. We must not delude ourselves about that matter or we
may find we learn the truth of it at such a slow and painful rate that our previous efforts of personal wheel
re-invention seem like a virtual renaissance by comparison.
Our daily world often appears to rival light’s speed rather than its brilliance or purity. While I was first
learning how to think and choose action like an alchemist, I hadn’t yet approached the crossroads of mid-
life realignment. Thus it was the uncontested lessons of my childhood that fueled most of my personal
choices; these lessons were not often carefree, but they were indeed wise. I understood people had a
lot more power over personal balance than they’d normally admit. Gradually, my life’s experience and
observations suggested this failed admission hung on the counter-balance of convenience and a certain
baseline reality of time limitation. I didn’t perceive people allowing themselves to be ‘handled’ by
politicians or priests or the media because they were stupid – I felt this occurred because it allowed the
majority of us to maintain a cocoon of twilight sleep in which we need not face our inner or outer demons
too directly. We wake in order to forget. That simple koan resembles the motivational patterns of my
particular generation a lot more closely than I might wish.
Life was hard (I reasoned as a child), and many we meet seem more than willing to step up to the plate
and teach us a thing or two about just how rough it can get. Why would I ever want to do the same thing
on the inside, where it actually did the most damage? There seemed no shortage of baggage I’d
eventually have to deconstruct. I saw, felt, and created no need to invent more. When I moved further
into the world, I developed a flair for also moving inward. People frequently admired what they
perceived as an ability to care for my own needs, as opposed to merely indulging or saturating them.
This projective talent became an organic reality when I stopped drinking and smoking, at 26. The
following year I became a mother and such an overwhelming and frequently unpredictable life-change
made me very conscious of the need for diligently crafted personal time and space. By the time I was
35, I could have given very effective lessons in self-honoring, but that would have taken too much time
and space from the way I was living it. I believe such intensive and diligent self-care is vital in direct
proportion to the amount of trauma or abuse one has suffered, and how long that suffering has been
unaddressed. I always advise clients and students to keep in mind that “trauma” tends to carry a
broader definition than we may wish; quite a number of us routinely downplay our own issues by calling
up a yardstick of Far-Worse comparison.
Other kinds of yardsticks may be more problematic and ingrained at a level we don’t recognize until the
hounds have been released. For instance, I was raised among very successful (if terminally offbeat)
over-achievers. They taught me the folly of many things that began to get up in my grill most
uncomfortably once I started the active daily practice of writing a book. It wasn’t just a book, it was a
reference compendium. It was meant to be used intensively, expanded-upon and used some more. In
fact, it was meant to expand so much that it would eventually become as much every book owner’s
intellectual property as it was mine. In the meantime, it was also meant to serve as a reliable and sound
self-teaching guide. And so forth. With this sort of constantly mushrooming, outwardly focused goal, I
was pretty quick to embrace the unhealthy, single-minded work ethics of my predecessors. How clearly I
remember more than one relative declaring that if you weren’t dog tired and ‘fit to die’ at the end of every
day, you really hadn’t had a day worth living. Apparently I’d absorbed such maxims right along with illicit
CrackerJacks and maddeningly effective early 60’s television jingles.
One of the first times I realized this at an organic level, I was writing the rough draft of the Jewelweed
profile for the SL flower essence Handbook. During the years when I’d been actively collecting the
information, I had relatively little trouble relaxing and ‘going off the clock’. I would have thought I’d
learned it was a non-optional activity forevermore, given an earlier dance I’d taken with chronic dis-
ease. Then I decided to accomplish something that was both tangible and ambitious. The more tightly
focused that ambition became, the more it fueled a sense that I’d (pragmatically speaking) wasted
enough time being sick and so forth. I wasn’t just trying to squeeze as much as possible from every day,
I was also trying to implant that same time frame with an equal amount of energy/time I’d “lost” to illness
and resulting personal disarray.
More than a year and a half has passed since the days of rough draft writing. I’ve learned a few
perilous psychic and physical lessons about the ‘gifts’ of self-neglect, but I’m also re-learning the
gorgeous art of self-honor. The Handbook is in its third print-run, in the wake of substantive revision that
pretty much leaves it just as I originally planned, plotted and dreamed in my mind’s eye. I could have
relaxed a whole lot more along the way, but I’m convinced I’ll prove the hard-won wisdom was retained
in the way I embrace and shape my next large scale project(s). Even somebody like me, raised to
accomplish something only so they could move on to promptly accomplish something else, understands
that such achievement requires and deserves a bit of recuperative down-time. I’ve recently uncovered a
sincere desire to fully re-connect with the necessary process of Time Away from everything that normally
drives or defines me. In this manner, such driving force and self-definition becomes more fluid and far
less of a social, philosophical, emotional or creative mask.
I frequently embrace the various pitfalls and shortsighted aspects of my own life’s journey for teaching
and healing purpose. Every time I make this choice, I also laugh a great deal at my own
contradictions. This in turn lightens the load of stress or confusion that weaves itself into the organic
definition of any given lifepoint. Such laughter – released in a spirit of cock-eyed joy rather than grim
frustration - dissolves the cumulative scar tissue that we incur from self-neglect or the deliberately
orchestrated exploitation and/or deconstruction of our personality. Nobody can ever push our buttons or
get our knee jerking faster or more effectively than we can do it ourselves. Once we realize that, we
generally stop projecting meaning or intention onto others. We take people at face value because it’s
organically (if not always practically) sane and balanced to do as much. We operate from the place of
changes we want to be instead of the karmic equivalent of a bowling shoe rental station.
Every sentence in the last several paragraphs shows strong influence of the Jewelweed flower medicine
spirit – a remedy that teaches us to devalue and dissolve our various masks, to cut through the red tape
of self-imposed should’s and must’s and to help us re-train our minds and hearts so that we stop
embracing the endless folly of imagining it’s important to work more and dally less. Clearly, this is an
essence for any well-developed repertory to embrace. I understood the flower’s healing value on far
larger terms than those of my personal needs and so I spent a few months tracking the progress of
jewelweed colonies on the hillside where I currently prepare the Sparkling Lotus remedies. The more I
searched, the more clearly I didn’t-find the plant in places that were accessible or appropriate for an
infusion bowl. Anything that was accessible endured a recurring and terminally debilitating date with the
orchard’s tractor-mower. Eventually I reached a point of releasing my attachment to preparing the
remedy. It began to make its own backwards kind of sense.
I told more than one person that I would have thought the flowering plant would have done everything it
could to hook me up with an essence ASAP. But I am unworthy, I told a merrily flowering branch of the
Jewelweed tribe. I am too bound up in my patterns of workaholism to receive a proper attunement
with your vibrational signature. I started to take it seriously that other people were offering to prepare
the essence for me. I took it even more seriously when very gifted healers took the time to share
practical and highly effective tips on developing a better life balance and more joyous self-relationship.
I implemented each one of these tips quite promptly and without fanfare - primarily because I’d been
authentically humbled just enough to embrace organic change. I had the very opposite of nothing to
lose in that I shed considerable layers of attachment to outcome I hadn’t previously acknowledged. I
uncovered the lurking fear of mortality that’s never far from the prodigious outpouring of people my age.
I also acknowledged that I was overly concerned with becoming a little bit too imperfect if I didn’t stay
ever-diligent to the details of my path of service. At the very precipice of ‘learning the hard way’ I
recalled that, left unchecked, such ‘diligence’ will burn itself through all reserves of life force. It will burn
until ash itself would seem substantive. Through this eleventh hour shift in awareness, I uncovered a not-
at-all subverted horror of how thoroughly I’d embraced the anti-thesis of my formerly exalted personal
wisdom. I no longer took time for myself. In fact, I’d failed to do anything of the sort in so long that even
a gradual re-calibration was going to feel foreign, stiff, and contrived. This realization and its
implications burned itself through several layers consciousness. It was, as they say, go time. I was
ready to do a lot more than just take names.
On every scouting and alchemical expedition (covering a lovely range of wild-crafted essences related
to joy-building and/or cellular rejuvenation) I made note of the beautiful jewelweed blooming just beyond
my reach. I spoke to those flowers without shame or a hint of tricky-dog artifice. I have been like a child
in my unknowing but not in my state of grace or cosmic joy. Now I am calling grace and joy back
home to me, not in the spirit of sorrow to have lost my way but the spirit of hope that I’m beginning to
find it again.
Humility is the finest reward I know for working hard. I had a moment of sustained humbling on the day I
realized I was no more personally equipped to attune to the Zucchini flower medicine spirit than I’d been
fit to merge as one with Jewelweed. This awareness opened the door on some swift lessons related to
personal accountability and learning how to pursue more refined passion and authentic excellence of
craft. You need to be more patient. This advice came unsolicited from the Zucchini flower medicine
spirit living in the second Sparkling Lotus garden. The emphasis was on the pronoun, as if this be-ing
had been keeping ongoing (and undoubtedly accurate) tabs on every human who passed. I felt the
plant’s radiating waves of great love and wise counsel as if it had been a physical tractor beam. And I
smiled with gratitude as well as affection. In truth I also fell to my knees but sometimes that kind of
admission makes people squeamish.
24 hours later, I took a leisurely scouting walk with my husband. The day was beautiful and sparkling on
many levels. For about a week (and I say this with an emphasis on both inner landscape and outward
motion), I’d been experiencing the weird sense that my life’s flow had quite suddenly become a lot like
driving the Jaguar XJ6 of my dreams on an absolutely smooth highway. The ride was effortless except
for a startling tendency to misfire and shift roughly during least-expected moments of trusting each
moment’s perfection-within-IMperfection. As Jim and I walked through the humming August woods, I
thought of the seemingly random misfiring syndrome. What piece wasn’t I getting yet?
Those are simply intersection points with somebody else’s free will. THIS IS NOT YOUR SPIRIT’S
JOB OR PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY TO MAINTAIN!! This sudden and noticeably vibrant psychic
message automatically turned my head in search of the flower who had issued it. My jaw may have
literally dropped as I pointed in wordless amazement. We’d made a sudden turn with the curves of the
field that left us standing in front of a solid wall of flowering jewelweed. It had grown very quickly in the
few weeks since its latest mowing. This prodded me to smile and nod in recognition of a very potent
aspect of the flower remedy’s properties – that of graceful and fluid access to rapid change/growth
cycles. Fruition finds each one of us easily enough if we grow well in the meantime.
The flowers sent me home with this message and the next day I returned following dreamtime
permission to co-create. I freely admit that I prepared this particular essence bowl as carefully and
gratefully as I ever have. I may have smiled a bit more, and I also think I was less fiercely intent on my
intention to keep everything about the process pure and uncontaminated. When I went home, I inverted
my usual routine – resting first and foremost and then beginning a new round of activity with something
that was purely fun and smile inducing. By the time I got as far as what I usually do first (setting up the
remedy collection bottles and individual filtering systems) I was pretty much smiling non-stop.
On this same day, I prepared four other essences. That level of alchemical charge and electrical
attunement would normally have a bit of an energetic downside. Instead, my sense of general
consciousness and electrical flow remained golden. I felt my awareness moving, quite flawlessly, far
beyond the perspectives I’d nurtured while it felt beyond my faltering humanistic capabilities to prepare a
Jewelweed remedy. I’m very grateful the plants themselves made sure I only had access to a remedy
that was properly calibrated attunement-wise rather than merely attained. Every night since then, I’ve
indulged an often-overlooked love of star and sky gazing. Among other things, I’ve used the quiet and
enjoyable mind/body space to construct prayers of gratitude. Special thanks is always offered for the
implicit blessings in my emerging track record of harvesting all the remedies I need for my personal well-
being, as well as so many I simply want to know at a closer level, or have on hand for the specific and
evolving needs of my client roster.
Every parable benefits from a direct context. Most flower essence teachings provide context that is both
fluid and projection-proof. The direct application of flower essences can still hold a range of fairly
abstract findings. I don’t really know what many other alchemists feel inside or how deeply they journey
towards personal redemption while also serving as willing hands and feet for Our Mother. Gaia holds
us all tenderly enough to harvest considerable bounty even when we “fall behind” or otherwise put aside
our game faces and do-to-lists.
Every year, Jewelweed emerges from the earth with quiet fluidity and a rapid show of proliferation. The
plant grows quickly. It reaches the flowering stage around the same point anybody who lives by the
natural rhythms of Season may have reached a point of fairly herculean energetic output. Reaping, in its
truest sense, ought to be a slow and mindful ceremony of profound self-nurturance. If we slow down
enough to enjoy ourselves, we’re a lot more likely to connect with a sustained form of homeostasis.
These are the teachings I’ve received, as I have written them.
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Jewelweed Flower Portrait
