Plant Profile: Alpine Violet

& lymphatic tidal rivers...

Photo by Oleg Saprykin on Unsplash

Sweet Violet is one of those plants that grabs you when you walk past it but in such a gentle almost imperceptible way. The way a twinkling noise would catch you walking in the woods, moss underfoot. This ephemeral that lives hugging the forest floor brings such sweetness to the satin like feeling of early spring where in the shade the chill and glittering snow lingers and the barely perceptible warmth of sunlight are seemingly granted safe passage through the season not ready to let go of her grip around the neck of the color green. Violet giggles her way through the barely softened earth to greet the light and reminds us that it is okay to stop grieving now, to feel joy, to allow the sky to permeate our being after the hard frosts.

She reminds us that we can feel the childlike wonder even if we aren’t really ready to stop grieving yet. That it is okay to let our hearts stay broken for a moment longer before her medicine removes the rocks, sticks and mud stuck in our inner rivers. Violet, sweet violet, reminds us that we can let the tears fall as melted snow does when the air warms the streams packed with ice. A slow drip is better than none and it is the gentlest medicine.

There is a place we go when we feel the heavy arms of grief drag us into the ocean, further and further, the pressure somehow transforming us as we go down, like a heavy rain giving us permission to let our bones rest on the wet ground. There is a specificity about violet that attunes to this frequency while helping us realize “there is nothing that needs to be done right now” and that the business of our lives can wait a moment. Sometimes all we need is to rest where we are without wiggling our way out of it. Sometimes, all we need to do is be there with our grief, without calling it a monster or telling it that it’s ruining our life, screaming at it, telling it how rotten it is when we know damn well it isn’t. Grief is a major part of the human experience and the sooner we allow this being in the door, the sooner it can dry off by the warm fire and tea sweetly offered by us and tell us how it feels, what it needs. It is eerily similar to a very small child. And sweet violet is one of the best herbs for