Harvesting the Abundance: White Pine
When Pachamama leaves a massive bough of White Pine in your path after the thunderstorm on the full moon in Pisces, you don’t ask questions. You make White Pine vinegar, cordial, and start brewing pine needle tea. Maybe throw in a pine salt scrub. All while drinking full moon + citrine infused water, playing/singing Lakshmi mantras, and allowing yourself to be embraced and infused in the smoke of sandalwood and benzoin.
Releasing the false and outdated beliefs in our bones that everything has to be hard, that we won’t have anything if we don’t take it, that things work better when we •try• to control them, that we should feel guilty for receiving – Making space, unblocking the flow, and opening to the abundance wanting to come in. The White Pine facilitates this for us on every level: physical, emotional and spiritual. This is not to deny systemic oppression, but to destroy that system from the inside out. Mama shows the Way. Listen, listen. What self-imposed limitations are you carrying into the Fall that you no longer need?
If you ever have the fortune to find yourself in a cluster of White Pines, their sacred power can be staggering. In upstate New York where I am currently rooting down, and even more so the further north you go, White Pine is everywhere. And all parts of the pine are medicinal, showing us the true meaning of abundance. We can identify white pines by the bundles of 5 long needles (a great pneumonic that has always stuck with me is w-h-i-t-e / five letters / five needles). Like many medicinal herbs here in North America, we have the Indigenous People to thank for teaching us about this medicine. In fact, Native Americans introduced European colonizers to pine needle tea as a way to combat scurvy, a deadly disease caused by Vitamin C deficiency.
In Haudenosaunee legend, the 5 needles represent the 5 nations who came together in peace under the White Pine. Pine was later used as one of Bach’s flower essence remedies in a way that honors its work of Peace. The essence of White Pine is an ally for illuminating the ancient wisdom in our DNA to aid us in re-membering ourselves—getting dismembered is a painful process, but afterwards we get to put the pieces of ourselves back together in a new, higher form. It is so fitting that this tree acts as a potent drawing agent, used to draw out poisons, splinters, infection, and other unwanted things from the body. Just like a festering boil deep inside our bodies, we must pull all of the old pain, trauma and wounds to the surface to experience true healing and create more capacity within us for love, joy and compassion.
On the physical level, I like to think of White Pine as an adaptogen, but for the respiratory system rather than the endocrine system which most adaptogens act on. As a drawing agent and circulatory stimulant, White Pine stimulates the elimination of mucous both by oxygenating and enlivening the tissues and drawing out stagnant phlegm with its sticky resins that attach and expectorate. By dislodging and expelling what is stuck, it cultivates restoration to our innate state of harmony. When our mucous is flowing smoothly, the fluid coats our lungs with a layer of immunity-rich protection, so it’s excellent virus season medicine. If you’re being impacted by the wildfires out West, conifer medicine may also be really helpful.
Simply chewing the inner bark or pitch was a treatment for respiratory infections by Native Americans. And the Eclectics used the inner bark to make a cough syrup of White Pine with wild cherry bark (Prunus serotina), Spikenard Rt (Aralia racemosa), Balm of Gilead buds (Populus sp including Aspen and Cottonwood), Bloodroot (Sanguinaria canadensis), Sassafrass Rt (Sassafrass albidum). Its circulatory stimulant action can also be experienced by massaging it on the skin in a bath to move congested lymph and providing a respite from the exhaustion we get from burning the candle at both ends. A tea made from the pine needles can be used preventatively or to treat a cough/cold/flu: 1 part needles to 3 parts water, simmering until half the liquid remains, strain and drink 2-3 oz or combine with another herbal tea like peppermint and orange peel.
Studies on the Japanese practice of forest bathing demonstrate unequivocally that spending time in the forest enhances the production of Natural Killer cells, a fundamental component of our immune system. One of my teachers, Matthew Wood describes in The Earthwise Herbal how, in the early days of colonization, people would simply walk through White Pine woods to help heal their consumption and tuberculosis. The science is just describing this ancestral wisdom which is encoded in our DNA in a different language: inhaling volatile oils from pine and other conifers, as well as the microbiome of the woods, modulates our immune system. But the full spectrum of the healing powers of White Pine remains a mystery, and I’m totally ok with that.