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St. John's wort and the Solstice

© Barbara Hall

June 21st: Midsummer's Day - and didn't the St. John's wort bloom right on time?

I had a few friends gather just before the time of the exact Summer Solstice (10:03 a.m.) for a short meditation where we focused on accepting the shadow side of it all without judgement. We spoke of our first reaction to the days growing shorter as flinching over the coming of winter, but perhaps that is because we haven't yet learned to rest. We push as hard during the winter months as we do the rest of the year. Some of us feel this more than others as we are sensitive to the amount of sunlight we get during the day. Technically that is called seasonal affective disorder. Eeeewwwww, that sounds so awful, I prefer to call it the sunless grumpies and I do get it - yes indeed!

This is one of the many places where St John's wort (Hypericum perforatum) has become a good buddy of mine, and unless you've had your head under a barrel for the past year or so, you've no doubt noticed the amount of press St. John's wort has gotten of late. Poor St. J, seems to be suffering from a very human affliction: PANACEA-ITIS. By the time the press and marketing whizzes finish screaming about it and plastering exclamation points all over everything, they have it CURING everything from hangnails to cancer. Echinacea got the same treatment the year before.

Now don't get me wrong. They are both splendid herbs, very powerful and very effective. But they have been for the past 50,000 years or so, long before anyone figured out how to standardize the doses and shove the isolated active ingredient into tablets and capsules.

Let's leave that bottle on the shelf for a moment and come with me out into the fields to meet the plant itself. There are many flowers blooming yellow just now. The yellow sweet clover lines the roadsides, the buttercups are still waving around amidst the grasses and even mustards are still in bloom in the fields. But to the trained eye there is a clump of yellow, about 12 to 18 inches tall, and after YEARS of hunting I have become able to recognize it at 55 m.p.h. I have been known to skulk along the back parking lots of shopping malls searching for it (and often finding great stands of it). Last year I got serious and got into growing my own.

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