Borage for Courage
The sweet little blue flower with the mighty disposition
Some days and weeks, when life sweeps up chaos and outrageous change and its weight sits heavily upon us, we are tested. To see what we can endure and how much we can bear. To witness anew how we face this strong storming. To solemnly acknowledge what we let it take from us, how it soaks and solvents us and most importantly how we move differently once we are beyond it.
The trick is to not forget the counterbalance any wild season of galloping evolution demands. We muster courage from even the heaviest hearts and let it flicker all the way up to our irises. We find humour in the blackest and bleakest, because dark laughter is sometimes the best medicine. We stay true and refuse to be bowed or beaten. We reach out and in, connect and create, shapeshift into what this moment demands.
And it demands love, in all its glorious forms, always found in the comfort and nourishment of the natural world.
“When you are caught up in the world that you did not design as support for your life and the life of earth and people, it is like being caught in someone else's dream or nightmare. Many people exist in their lives in this way. I say exist because it is not really living. It is akin to being suspended in a dream one is having at night, a dream over which one has no control. You are going here and there, seeing this and that person; you do not know or care about them usually, they are just there, on your interior screen. Humankind will not survive if we continue in this way, most of us living lives in which our own life is not the center.”
~ Alice Walker, The Way Forward is With A Broken Heart
There are so many plants that soothe a broken heart. Hearts ease violas. Motherwort and rose. Hawthorn and comfrey and the sweetest nectar star of them all, our girl Borago.
Borage boasts hairy beanstalks that vine and ribbon and cannot bear their own weight. Still they clamber, fall and reset themselves, flounder and fail and re-sprout. A borage left to its own devices is a marvel of resilience and its steely determination to endure is lusciously rewarded. Its leaves are oversized and messy in the way they curl and turn but they will surprise you with the softest waft of cucumber relief.
If you pluck one of its tiny blue star shaped flowers, sometimes a pinky lavender in the sunshine and sometimes cornflower blue under dark skies, and place it upside down on your tongue, you are dosed. Sweetest courage from the most unlikely of places spreading from your tongue to your heart before you can even swallow. Small and mighty with an unexpected potency, surprising beauty and prolific blooms.
I always have borage tucked somewhere in my garden and tend to notice its flowers just as the season turns and I am in need of fresh fortification. Nurseries everywhere tuck borage away in their herb sections and you can bring it home to pop in under a fruit tree or some woody scraggler it can climb upon once it sets its feet in. You can candy its flowers in a simple sugar syrup, add young leaves to salads and devote the stems to the worms in your compost. It will atrract bees and butterflies and delight many a critter in your garden.
In herbalism borage is a fortifier and works on the adrenals as a tonic. It restores you before and after the bracing. Roman soldiers would mix it with wine before battle, medieval lovers too when their hearts would break. Don’t tell big pharma but borage seed oil is one of the richest natural sources of GLA (Gamma-linolenic acid), a fatty acid that lowers inflammation and dilates blood vessels. You can find it as “starflower oil” and use it for everything from arthitis and pain relief, skin issues, diabetes and respiratory disorders. Its high fat content used to fortify premature babies and it helps restore milk supplies in mama too.
All the old plants have far more to them than the pharmacognosy and our late stage scientific classification. And you can tell when you dig into a plant’s prolific use all over in the world. In France it brought down fevers and in Greece was an everyday ingredient in ravioli and salad. In China where borage calls itself Lui Li Ju and works on the lung and liver meridians, it cools and clears damp heat. In Iran borage tea soothed lungs, kidneys and the inflamed. Right across the ancient world from Syria to Lebanon, Egypt through the Mediterranean, borage raised the spirits treating melancholy, sorrow and dour hearts by instilling the courage to go on. Some historians believe that borage may be the nepenthe plant mentioned in Homer’s Odyssey, which had forgetfulness-inducing properties, stealing the sting and replacing it with fortification and the drive to go on.
In olde herbals all written hundreds of years ago in the north borage is plant of Jupiter and corresponds to Sagittarius, which is perhaps why it comes into my awareness in the middle of the year here in the great southern wilds. In magic as in folklore and kitchens for centuries it raises the spirit from the doldrums, a wonderful addition to charm pouches and talismans for courage and facing adversity head on. Its five pointed star shape conjures the heavens and brings their benefic gaze to all your endeavours, and sweetest to the trying.
Sweet borage light—so brief, and clear!
When furry leaves wilt and winter is near,
Restore my will to grow,
Renew my strength to grieve,
For all new life will pass,
All starflowers go to seed.~ Hilary Jacobson, 2020
