Plants do not fight their seasons. A tree does not resist winter because it is inconvenient. It does not perform spring before it has arrived. It moves through each season with what can only be described as complete intelligence — not rushing, not bypassing, not pretending to be somewhere it is not.
I have thought about that a great deal in the context of grief.
"The plant does not resist its season. It moves through it, fully, and emerges changed. This is what grief asks of us."
We spend so much of our grief energy resisting the season we are in. Trying to move faster, to feel better, to return to productivity, to stop crying in the car. We treat grief as a malfunction rather than an intelligence. As something to be fixed rather than something to be moved through.
What plants know about the body in grief
My relationship with plants and herbs is lifelong. Before I formalised it as Sheharazaad's Miracles, before I knew to call it anything, it was simply the way I understood healing. Through what grows. Through what roots. Through what has been growing in the earth for longer than any of us have been alive.
What plants know — what they have always known — is that the body under stress needs different support than the body at rest. Grief is one of the most profound stressors a human body can experience. It changes the nervous system. It changes the gut. It changes sleep, appetite, immune function. It is not only an emotional experience. It is a physical one.
The plants I work with have been used for centuries — in some cases, millennia — to support the body through exactly this. Not to make the grief go away. Not to perform wellness before it has arrived. But to hold the body in a way that makes moving through the grief more possible.
Herbal support as an act of care
There is something in the act of preparing a herbal remedy — the intentionality of it, the slowness, the relationship with the plant itself — that is itself an act of care. When you receive a preparation from Sheharazaad's Miracles, you are receiving something that was made with attention to you, to your season, to what your body is carrying.
That is not the same as a supplement from a catalogue. It is the difference between something produced and something offered. The plants have something to say about grief. I have spent a lifetime learning to listen. And what I know is that the body in grief deserves the same quality of presence we offer the mind.