The cosmic (hi)story of a nettle tea

Come drink eons of interlaced life, death & belonging.

photo by TelmaGL

I am a nettle in modern and urbanized lands.

Some call me weed, disdain in their voice. Hating the urticaria that defends me from predators and unaware footsteps. Hating that I grow in ‘inconvinient’ places, where the wind sowed me.

But you, you know my medicinal properties. You drink me as tea, because I serve you:

I aid those with sore muscles, gout, arthritis, prostate hyperplasia, diabetes, alergies… I am a rich source of antioxidants, iron, minerals… my body holds an alphabet of vitamins…

So, you don’t call me weed… no, your sense of yield makes you call me medicine, benefit… and you consume me.

But do you know me beyond my service, beyond profit?

Do you respect me as sister, and not only product?

Sow reciprocity

Uproot consumption

Allow me a request, in reciprocity for the medicine: do not consume me, without knowing me. Do not consume me, without loving me. I ask of you, in ecosystemic echo:

Let me interrupt that language of extraction governing and guiding you with violence.

Let me sting that over-extractive ways in which you address yourself and others.

Let me expand the medicine from the veins into the consciousness.

Let me tell you my cosmic (hi)story, as old as the Universe.

Let me guide you into ecosystemic awareness.

Sow ecosystem

Uproot egotism

Let me start by the iron in my body, the iron that nourishes your blood, your animal body, when you consume me: I absorb it from this modern soil, through my roots, but it was born from star death and ancestral bacteria life.

When a star’s core collapses and explodes, heavy iron atoms are formed and spread across the universe. In the beginning of life on Earth, in the primitive ocean, dissolved iron inherited from those supernovas, combined with the oxygen released by the first photosynthetic organisms. The fusion created haematite, magnetite… iron deposits on the Earth’s rocks. Billions of years later, those deposits are still nourishing Life, soil, my body, your body.

Sow deep time.

Uproot rush.

I know you lack trust in me, because I sting hives into your skin. But what if I tell you that the calcium carbonate and the silica that shape my trichomes, these needles that bother those touching me, are protective astral inheritance? Elements also forged by stars.

What if I told you that this calcium carbonate, essential to life’s evolution on Earth, its the same shaping seashells, and that the same silica shapes the sand where they rest…

What if I told you that this calcium carbonate is the same of the coral skeletons left behind as extinction’s warning… your own skeleton is also made from calcium carbonate…

The hives? it is your skin’s reaction to the formic acid I inject. The same as bees, ants, wasps... We don’t sting you to attack, but to defend. A reminder that this Land is not yours to own. A reminder that we’ve been evolving as long as you have, that we belong.

Can you see then, the elemental, universal, evolutionary, threads interlacing us?

Can you feel how entangled we all are, through common ancestry?

Sow common ancestry

Uproot separation

I am, as you are, Earth’s evolution inheritance, born from symbiosis, competition, extinction. Life and Death.

My microscopic algae ancestors who lived in primordial oceans united their photosynthetic knowledge: alchemy from sunlight to sugar - with the fungi, who knew how to extract nutrients and minerals from rocky ground. That’s how life evolved on land. Their symbiosis evolved mycorrhiza, roots, later seeds… and the more land plants evolved and grew, more carbon dioxide was fixed from the atmosphere, more oxygen was released.

Roots further eroded rock, transforming star death into life on Earth. Death and excrement of land bodies fertilized eroded rock into soil. Barrenness evolved into more and more life forms. My botanical ancestors transformed, and were transformed by, the Earth’s atmosphere, geology and biology.

Sow creativity

Uproot sterility

Since then, more than 500 thousand species of land plants have evolved: form microscopic mosses to giant sequoias. With plants, co-evolved all of life.

You see, we are generous kin! In an ecosystem, they call us producers, base of the food web. We transform sun and water into biodiversity. Our transpiration is a keystone of the oxygen cycle that fills your lungs. Oxygen that has been co-created by organisms and ecosystems that you assume to be disconnected: deserts, tropical forests, oceans. Storms, clouds, rivers, mountains. Dung beetles, saprophyte mushrooms, pollinator bats, condors brought back from near-extinction, microscopic diatoms that can be seen from space…

All these complexity, all this beauty, all this planetary connection, in a single breath, that you take for granted.

Sow co-creation

Uproot exceptionalism

I’m a nettle from modern and urbanized lands, sowed by wind in all ecosystems, but the poles. Thus, I know much.

I’m hermaphrodite, I tend to doubt binary worldviews. Thus, I know Life well.

Humans study me, mitigate me, eat me, drink me, weave dresses of interlaced grief and love from my fibers. Thus, I know you well.

Trust me then, when I say that we are interstellar atom, turned planetary metabolism, turned Life, nettle, culture, tea, human…

Sow relationship

Uproot indifference

Can you understand then, that from Nettle to Universe, the distance is none?

That from you to planetary ecosystem, the separation is merely your porous skin?

There is, however, a made-up distance, a really violent one: those epistemological walls of techno-capitalistic individualism that you inherit and perpetuate, adding bricks from the inside.

Labor that comes with no profit and too high of a cost: your belonging, your regenerative relationships with life on Earth.

photo by TelmaGL

Consume me then, because it is impossible to not consume! Nourish yourself, yes, consciously, in reciprocity and respect for our collective, interlaced, (hi)story.

In relationship, I invite you to look, to stare! at the intersectional oppressions of your human world. Face the parts of you rooted in concealed alliance with the systems that dishonor Life.

Stare deeply and take responsibility! Be brave! It stings, but the reward is freedom.

Do not hide from the parts of you that, drunk on distracted privilege, uphold the system that oppresses all.

Let us escape, together, these isolation walls.

Not because we disassociate from their existence, but because in every crack, between sterile cement, we grow Life.

In every urticaria, we regenerate healing.

Sow ecosystemic belonging

Uproot individualist violence

Sow regeneration

Uproot oppression

This (hi)story is based on empirical scientific data and was created for the “Nettle tea” workshop I held in March, hosted by Vento e Água - Ritmos da Terra if you’d like to be notified of future workshops, drop me a DM and I will add you to the workshop mailing list!