In so many ways Anna was everything that I am not. Where I feel slow and sluggish, Anna blazed forth with a fiery sword. Where I feel procrastination and reluctance, Anna knew what she wanted, and seized it with purpose and forthrightness. Where I am so deeply reticent and ambivalent about this whole incarnating on the earth in a human body thing, Anna was getting on with it, tending the micro biome, saving seeds, creating food forests.
Despite these disparities of nature, my friendship with Anna was such a rich source of nourishment and balm to me. Maybe my mistletoe liminality, was lent ballast from Anna’s deep roots, succour from her groundedness.
Honest and real, and always grounded in the practically manifest, I was infinitely impressed with her capacity to wield a chainsaw, providing wood for both of our hearths, as the children and I, dogs underfoot, lugged and hauled the cut logs. I recall homemade sourdough pizza and kiwi fruit wine, music and laughter, the children’s raucous play, as I tucked in amongst the drying calendula in a corner of her kitchen and poured my heart out to the deep receptacle of her space holding. The steep climb up the flanks of Mount Little Joe, flaunting our locked-down 5km limit to celebrate Anna’s birthday. Flourless orange cake with a view, wildflowers abounding. Anna and Nelly climbed that mountain religiously and often for a while there.
And just this summer gone, long days swimming in the river or the dam, escaping the heat, hot chips and gravy for dinner as the sun set and the air began to cool a little, the children’s capacity to stay in the wet never ceasing. Simple, easy, safe, nourishing beingness. Life with Anna.
When I see her now, in my minds eye, it is a visage of joy that I see, with a dash of mischief and a lavish dose of compassionate warmth. It was infectious that joy of hers. My melancholic nature was always enlivened vicariously by her company. I became more when I was in her presence. I was made more radiant in her reflection. Life with Anna always felt so full of precious possibility.
Anna did not wait for permission, she threw herself at life. One day when I visited her after she had received her diagnosis and our conversation veered toward the possibility of her death, she spoke to me of how she wondered if she had lived so intensely precisely because a part of her had known it would not be for long.
She birthed her beautiful children young and as she raised them she studied her passion of herbalism, building and growing gardens and also calling forth her extraordinary business of Community Supported Herbalism. Back to Earth Medicine not only bestowed us with her hand crafted remedies, but also taught us, her community, how to make those remedies ourselves.
She was a grower, a maker, an educator, a healer, a guide, passionately reinforcing the need to consistently integrate and reliably practice the healing interface between human and plant world. Advocating for it’s capacity to heal and enliven us, as we cultivate a more embodied and actualised relationship with the bountiful Apothacary of nature’s gifts. Putting our roots down, growing the medicine that would heal the whole world.
The natural world was Anna’s playground, gathering herbs and weeds from the wild, gleening apples from the roadside, foraging fungi in the forest. She was a true weedwife, her kitchen always full of fermenting vats and drying racks of herbs, plant matter strung from the rafters and concoctions, brews and potions in various recepticals adorning every surface. Nature’s abundance and medicinal potency permeated every corner of her life. Kombucha, sourdough, fruit wine, mead, herbal teas, tinctures, decoctions, ferments. She was alive with burgeoning becoming.
And within all of this, so often close by her side, her precious children, equally wild and wise, cheeky and loving. Miraculous in their capacity to identify edible plants, to find and tend to animals of all kind, to build what was needed to create containment and structures through which their wild life could perpetually bloom and multiply, chickens, quail, guinea pigs, goats. Always laughter, always fun, a little chaotic at times, but always life giving, bestowing all who walked in their wake with that vibrant glow of the grace of being alive. My daughter loved her time in the garden with Anna, she’d always come home green-stained and full of new wisdoms.
We remember the time when Anna was constantly followed by the wild duckling named Fifi, that recognised her as mother for a time. There are many images of her snuggled in close to a chicken beloved, and her bond with Nelly, her rescue dog, was a match made in heaven. Anna’s vocal tone, rising to pitches of the most abiding Motherese, as she bestowed an endless stream of endearments, entoning praise and reassurance upon her beloved animal familiar.
Anna loved deeply and passionately, with a generative tension between the impulse to fiercely follow her own independent path and direction, and her deep capacity for relational succour and transformative connection. The part of Anna that was a huntress of truth, often drove her down pathways that were not always the easy route, but which were steeped in deep enquiry and a wild instinct for integrity and sacred thresholds of becoming.
In friendship Anna was voluminous, it seems now that she maybe had 101 best friends, each of us coveting our closeness as a precious gem, only to find there were so many of us that held her close in this way. Age was no barrier to her friendship’s, she loved us all, just as she found us. We, as the kith that mattered to her, were nourished so deeply at her hearth and privileged to offer her heart shelter and tending in her own turn. Because she was fierce in her living, but she was also courageous in her capacity for vulnerability. She was good at asking when she had need, she could rest into arms of comfort and weep in her hours of pain, just as she could set the world alight with the twinkle of mischief in her effervescent laughter. She effortlessly called in such profoundly devoted service from her beloveds in the last months of her life.
I have heard others speak of her tendency towards the brutally blunt. It is true she did not dilute her truth very readily, and yet, she was always gentle with me. Perhaps she also understood the fragility that living inside the constellations of our woundedness, the kind that do not heal, can afford us. We shared that root, and offered salve to each other, when those energies rose and entangled our vitality.
One of the last times I saw Anna, she asked me to brush her hair, which had matted and locked from lying so long, and as I ran the brush through that auburn glow, deep, thick hair, vibrant with health, it seemed such a strange and incomprehensible paradox, to know of the potential imminence of her physical decline, the profundity of her pain and yet to simultaneously behold her vitality and beauty, the warm olive of her skin, the potent vitality of her hair, the thrumming life force of her sleek and potentised body, the purity of her seeking heart, the natural way she inhabited her skin, even in her pain.
And still a strange liminality lingers, even as her body has passed from this world, yet we are tending our cracked lips with her lemon myrtle balm and administering hawthorn elixir for our broken hearts. All the remedies that were so lovingly crafted by her hand are what we reach for when our bodies have need of healing. She is tending to us yet from her place in the beyond. We have all been left behind, to mourn her loss as she blazes on to her next grand adventure.
I loved Anna, I still do, I always will. She made my life more alive and connected. I am so honoured that she chose me to be numbered as one of her many friends. I want her legacy to embed itself into my days, I want her to shine out to me from the hedgerow, as berry and fruit and leaf and stem and root. I want her to entangle me, to trip me again and again into this connection to the mystery through relationship with nature, through mushroom, moss and lichen, fur and claw, ferment and compost, tooth and bone. I want to drink deep of her moonshine and get drunk on her love for the wild. Her wild love.
We are all in our own and varied ways profoundly grieved, but also undoubtedly enriched and blessed and privileged to have been amongst those she knew and loved. I know we will all watch her shining out forever, shining out as nature’s offerings, through her exquisite children, and as we, her star struck kin and kith, share our memories of her around the tender hearthfires of our love.
I offer my deepest prayers of solace and peace to her family, to her children, and her inner circle who she treasured so deeply. The loss is unfathomable, to all of us, who will always miss a world that had Anna shining inside of it.
Words copyright Lucy Pierce 2022
