In this workshop we enter a Nordic worldview in which land is awake, plants are persons, and health is maintained through right relationship with the more-than-human world. Drawing from folklore and traditional medicine, we’ll explore how plants were understood not only by “what they do,” but by their temperaments, their teachings, and their predicaments in stories.

We’ll convene a council of plants – including one “dark” trance medicine from the historical record -as a living map of Norse cosmology, organized by frith: the woven field of safety and right order that makes a body – and a community – habitable. Applied to medicine, it means health is restored by repairing sanctuary, boundaries, reciprocity, and coherence—using plants not only for their actions, but as relational allies that teach how to live in right relationship with body, land, season, community and beings of nature. Smoke, steam, and scent cultivate sanctuary, clearing residue and resetting the household field after shock or grief. Thorn, resin, and bitter leaf re-establish boundary, offering discernment and warding without rigidity. Astringent and styptic allies enact repair, closing what was torn and gathering what was scattered back into coherence. Sap, bud, and spring greens invite renewal, returning vitality through right timing and reciprocal harvest. In this lineage, medicine is inseparable from place and respect: what you gather, when you gather, how you approach, and what you give back. 

Alongside story and traditional practice, we’ll juxtapose modern phytochemistry and clinical research – where it aligns and where it complicates the old ways – using science as another language of listening rather than a replacement for tradition. Participants will leave with a framework for building a Nordic materia medica rooted in an ancestral, animate worldview of reciprocity and relationship.